This 16 January 2015 email shows BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith sending a short subject-only message to Alan White, Tom Phillips and Luke Lewis asking whether Tom and Alan were “close on that CEN story”. The document is a brief but useful evidence-chain item because it records senior BuzzFeed pressure to move the CEN article towards completion, without any accompanying discussion of the evidence, source base, language problems, original reporting or verification gaps. It should be read alongside the fuller related exchange at BuzzFeed_009599, where the same pressure to finish the story appears in a slightly wider chain, and with the “easy bit” and Craig Silverman budget documents, because together they help document the senior editorial push to complete the article while the investigation’s methodology and verification route were still unresolved.