This 28 March 2015 email chain shows Craig Silverman advising Alan White on how BuzzFeed should approach Mike Leidig before publication of the CEN article. The document is significant because Silverman recommends a deliberately friendly strategy, saying Leidig “clearly has high opinion of the real journalism he does” and suggesting that BuzzFeed should cite his Bernie Madoff book and his writing for Press Gazette, present him as a “serious journo”, and ask him about how online news had changed content economics and harmed original reporting. Silverman says this “does seem like the best way to get him to agree to talk” and adds that BuzzFeed’s previous purchases from Leidig may also help him “open up at first”. The chain is also useful because it sits inside a wider discussion of unresolved proof problems: Silverman says the Argentinian teacher story did not appear on CEN’s sites and that BuzzFeed needed other sources to confirm CEN had sold text and photos, while Alan White says he favoured a “tread softly then gradually amp up the questions approach”. It should be read alongside the front-up, “easy bit”, right-to-reply and proof-gap documents, because it shows BuzzFeed considering how to obtain cooperation from the subject of the article while still trying to fill gaps in the evidence base behind the planned claims.