This 5–8 August 2014 email chain shows Craig Silverman consulting an Austrian media contact about Austrian Times, CEN and EuroPics while preparing his Justin Bieber bear-attack story, months before the later BuzzFeed/CEN article. The document is significant because Silverman asks whether Austrian Times would “take real story and embellish it with false facts to make it more likely to spread”, and the Austrian contact replies that, from an editorial trustworthiness point of view, Austrian Times was “like any blog out there. Zero.” Silverman then returns to the contact shortly before publication, saying he had evidence that Austrian Times and affiliated agencies CEN and EuroPics had inserted fabricated material into a story and may have taken images from Pravda, and asks to quote the contact on the record. The chain helps identify the likely “guy in Austria” later referenced in Silverman’s CEN-related work and shows that Silverman’s negative view of CEN/Austrian Times was shaped partly through an outside Austrian contact first approached during the Bieber story, before that source-chain appears to have fed into the later BuzzFeed investigation. It should be read alongside the later BuzzFeed/CEN documents in which Silverman refers to information from “the guy in Austria”, because it helps document the continuity between the earlier Poynter/Justin Bieber verification work and the later BuzzFeed/CEN narrative.