BuzzFeed Warns Staff To Avoid CEN Photo Credits In Viral Story Guidance

This 23 March 2015 email from Ryan Broderick to BuzzFeed’s London editorial team lists “standard dont bother writing about this topics” that BuzzFeed staff should usually avoid. The list includes world’s oldest person claims, world records, weird-food claims, some body-modification stories, death or mutilation stories, most Kickstarter stories, ghost stories, some YouTube street-filming videos, most hashtag activism, and “any story you see that has CEN photo credit”. The document is significant because it shows CEN being singled out internally as a warning category before publication of BuzzFeed’s article, not as a case-by-case verification issue but as an editorial red flag in itself. It also helps explain the wider newsroom atmosphere around the investigation: BuzzFeed was already treating CEN-branded material as something to avoid, while simultaneously building a public article about CEN’s alleged role in viral news. The author of this internal warning, Ryan Broderick, was later fired by BuzzFeed News in 2020 after an internal review found plagiarism and misattribution in his own work, which adds a useful contextual irony to a document in which he warned colleagues away from CEN material on editorial standards grounds. [Needs citation to 2020 Ryan Broderick plagiarism/firing reports.]

Source

Part of Central European News & Mike Leidig v BuzzFeed (US Second Circuit Libel Case) – BF Case Documents

Europe Media Published 1 May 2026 at 21:09 Source: 1 November 2016