BuzzFeed Struggles To Identify Its Own Previous CEN Posts Including Bieber Bear Attack Before Publication

This 1 April 2015 email shows Alan White telling Robert Colvile and Tom Phillips that BuzzFeed’s own data team had been “a bit useless” when asked to help find BuzzFeed’s previous CEN posts, meaning the team would have to do it “the old-fashioned way” using Google “supersearch” and hoping they had found them all. White adds that he “had no idea” BuzzFeed had done the Bieber bear attack story, giving a concrete example of BuzzFeed discovering more of its own CEN-linked material while the article was still being edited. The document is significant because it shows BuzzFeed had not fully established the extent of its own previous use of CEN material even as it was preparing to publish a major article attacking CEN and other publishers for using such stories. It is also important because the Bieber bear attack story was the item that helped connect BuzzFeed with Craig Silverman’s work, yet Silverman himself appears to have focused on MailOnline’s use of the story without noticing, or at least without foregrounding, BuzzFeed’s own use of the same material. On that reading, an example used to criticise MailOnline and CEN could just as easily have raised the same question about BuzzFeed. The document therefore sits directly with the client/customer issue: rather than transparently setting out the practical history of BuzzFeed’s CEN use, the team was still trying to reconstruct that history shortly before publication, apparently without confidence that it had found everything.

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