This 15 January 2015 BuzzFeed email chain shows Alan White, Tom Phillips, Luke Lewis and Richard James discussing the developing CEN/Emergent story while the investigation was still at an early and uncertain stage. The document is significant because White states that BuzzFeed had “actually devoted no time at all yet” beyond phone calls with Craig Silverman, while also saying the article would show that several BuzzFeed competitors had been publishing “huge lies” on a “close-to-industrial scale” and would “probably be the end for this guy’s business”. That wording records the commercial and reputational stakes BuzzFeed understood the story to carry, including its likely impact on rival publishers and on CEN, while also recognising that people would be “keen to shoot it down” and that every detail therefore had to be accurate. The chain is especially important because White distinguishes between the “easy bit” of internet debunking and the harder work of verifying “particularly unverifiable chinese/indian stories”, source material and provenance, with Phillips suggesting they may need a Chinese speaker from the US or someone from BuzzFeed India. Later deposition questioning put this “easy bit” phrase directly in issue, with Tom Phillips denying that the work was limited to internet research but giving only limited examples beyond online checking, including speaking to a Russian photographer and using Tanya Chen for Chinese translation. This document should therefore be read alongside the later deposition material and other BuzzFeed/CEN language-checking and Craig Silverman documents, because it helps document the gap between BuzzFeed’s own early recognition that more than online debunking was required and the later evidence that the investigation remained heavily dependent on internet research, cut-and-paste source gathering and external verification from Silverman. It is also relevant that White asks to be taken off viral duties in order to work on the CEN story, because it records BuzzFeed’s own overlap with the kind of viral material and online story selection that it was simultaneously preparing to criticise in CEN.