So, the latest freesheet to hit London - The London Weekly - arrived on Friday leaving the capital's media community bemused, amused and generally confused.

Basically, the paper was awful, with over half the stories either pasted straight from a press release or off someone else's website, no exclusives and little actual news, a plethora of basic graphic design rules broken (but not in a funky anti-establishment way), and many snetences ritten a like this bit one. There was very little advertising, and at least two of the ads that were inside (seemingly booked by Ticketmaster) blatantly linked to advertorial. Meanwhile the promised "city wide distribution" seemed to be confined to a handful of tube stations. Oh, and the Top 5 albums of the week feature only reviewed four records.

Of course, it's all too easy for the media establishment to mock and disregard newcomers and upstarts, and often said establishment lives to regrets such initial cynicism. But then I'm not sure there has ever been a disregarded newcomer quite as bad as this one. In fact, it was so bad that, when coupled with the previously reported mystery behind who is backing the new paper, the Twitterati began to speculate that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax in a Chris Morris style, perhaps designed to be some sort of publicity stunt, perhaps for Morris' new film. But if the Weekly was a joke, well, the punchline is yet to be delivered, and the few people who are admitting to having a link with the paper are yet to do the big reveal.

It seems more likely that the paper is just a badly thought out misadventure by a group of ambitious media mogul wannabes who misjudged just how much work has to go into producing even a mediocre publication. A particular misjudgement was to vastly oversell the product before its launch. In fact, had the paper quietly slipped onto the market in an east London suburb, slowly built a team of aspiring young journalists who would probably work for free, and grown and developed over a year or so before boldy taking on the whole capital, they might have got away with such a poor first effort.

The aforementioned media establishment relished the rubbishness of the product so much because of the bold claims made by The London Weekly's mysterious publishers late last year, that they would single handedly mop up the market left by thelondonpaper and London Lite, the now defunct London freesheets created by the publishers of The Times and Daily Mail respectively.   

The identity of The London Weekly's publisher remains a mystery. It's named publishers - the Global Publishing Group - don't really exist, and neither the paper nor its website provides any information of the publication's physical office or the identity of its printers, two omissions which I'm pretty sure are against the law (such information is required, if nothing else, so anyone libelled knows who to sue - though the Weekly's terms and conditions optimistically try to distance the publishers from any liabilities rising from the content within, possibly because half of it really came from unknown online sources).

The blogosphere and media like the Media Guardian are linking the title to an East London urban music outfit called The Invincible Group, whose main claim to fame, other than a rather strange corporate website, is that they produce the previously reported and therefore very real Urban Music Awards. The company is headed up by the self-proclaimed "serial entrepreneur" Jordan Kensington, though his own social media presence has been very quiet about any involvement in the capital's newest media.

So, lots remains to be seen. Whether The London Weekly is, in fact, an elaborate hoax, or just a publishing misadventure. Whether Invincible are, in fact, the company behind the project. And whether the whole thing will make it to issue two on Friday. If, by some extraordinary turn of events, this newspaper transforms itself into a going concern, bagsy the film rights.