This 6 January 2015 email chain shows Tom Phillips telling Luke Lewis that the BuzzFeed/CEN story had been put on hold because Craig Silverman was “completely tied up” at the end of the previous year, but that Phillips and Alan White were now ready to “jump back on it”. The document is significant because Phillips estimates that he and White would need at least a couple of days to “plough through the stories” they had gathered before deciding how many had been debunked, how many needed more digging, and whether BuzzFeed needed “people on the ground” to help, particularly because many of the stories were from India. Phillips also says Silverman would need to be paid at about USD 400 per day, likely around USD 2,000 in total, and raises the possibility of asking BuzzFeed News in New York to cover it because senior people there were “fans of Craig” and knew he was due to meet Ben Smith about Emergent. Luke Lewis replies: “Cool no worries about the budget lets do it” and says they should block out time to get it done “in one go rather than piecemeal”. The document should be read alongside the “easy bit”, Silverman budget and later verification documents, because it helps show BuzzFeed prioritising the CEN story, setting normal viral duties aside where possible, and treating Silverman’s paid external role as central to moving the investigation forward, while direct reporting, local checking and language/source verification remained unresolved questions to be considered later.