Press Gazette Spoiler Forces BuzzFeed To Consider Publishing CEN Story Before It Is Ready

This 24 April 2015 email chain shows BuzzFeed communications staff and UK editor Luke Lewis reacting after Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford contacted BuzzFeed for comment on a planned story about its investigation into CEN. The document is significant because Ponsford’s email records that he had seen a legal letter circulating among CEN’s UK national newspaper clients, had put BuzzFeed’s allegations to CEN, and had been told that CEN considered the approach groundless, commercially damaging and unfair because BuzzFeed was a competitor. BuzzFeed’s internal reaction shows the problem this created for the unpublished article: Alice Suh tells colleagues that Press Gazette had “got word of it”, Liz Wasden asks whether BuzzFeed could publish ahead of them, and Lewis shares the unfinished investigation while warning it is “not ready to publish yet”. The chain should be read alongside other pre-publication BuzzFeed/CEN documents concerning front-up letters, publisher contacts, Robert Colvile’s promotion efforts and the final publication strategy, because it helps document how BuzzFeed’s attempts to build the story through outside approaches also created a risk that CEN’s response and BuzzFeed’s possible competitive motive would become public before BuzzFeed’s own article was ready.

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