This 30–31 March 2015 email chain shows Alan White asking Tanya Chen, then a senior BuzzFeed editor in Canada, whether People’s Daily Online was reputable after MailOnline began linking to the site during the CEN investigation. White asks whether Chen knows anything about the site and whether it is reputable, saying CEN is “seemingly in partnership” with it. Chen replies that she has “never heard of the site”, will ask around, and later says most people she asked had not heard of it either, although a friend of her mother had read its articles and trusted it “as [a] news source” or at least considered it legitimate “on some level”. White replies: “Yeah that something to work with.” The document is significant because it shows BuzzFeed still using informal, improvised checks on Chinese-source material at the end of March, despite People’s Daily Online being the online arm of one of China’s most prominent state media organisations. Rather than using a specialist China source, institutional reference point, Chinese media expert, embassy/official contact, or a properly briefed correspondent, the check appears to have gone through a BuzzFeed colleague who said she had not heard of the site and then relied partly on a family contact’s impression. The value of the document is not that Chen did anything wrong, but that it exposes the weakness of BuzzFeed’s Chinese verification process: a major state-linked Chinese media source was being evaluated through ad hoc internal questioning and informal personal contacts while BuzzFeed was preparing a serious article alleging CEN’s involvement in fake or unreliable international viral news.