BuzzFeed Discusses Updating Its Own CEN Stories While Planning Charity Pressure And Vienna Confrontation

This 1 April 2015 email chain on April Fool's Day shows Alan White, Robert Colvile, Ben Smith, Shani Hilton, Luke Lewis, Tom Phillips and Heidi Blake discussing the near-final CEN article, including how BuzzFeed should handle its own previous use of CEN material. The document is significant because White says he had asked BuzzFeed’s data team to find posts “with CEN in the copy” but that this had not worked, meaning BuzzFeed would rely on “supersearch, google and hoping we don’t miss any” to identify its own CEN-linked stories. Ben Smith says BuzzFeed should “update our CEN stories in clear way maybe delete the text and talk to their authors”, while Colvile says they needed to find all CEN copy and “tag it as such or even delete”, adding that CEN did produce “genuine stories as well” but that BuzzFeed might label those as “dodgy” and point readers to the article. The chain is also important because it records BuzzFeed considering how to “amp up the luridness” of the article, with Smith referring to material “obsessed with castration”, while Shani Hilton asks whether CEN presented itself as real and says the article needed to establish that before “hammer[ing] that they are misleading people”. Colvile also says the charity angle was being held back until after Leidig was “fronted up” because BuzzFeed did not want it to “get back to him too early”, and dismisses Leidig’s explanation that tabloid news helped fund investigative work as a “spiel”. The email should be read alongside BuzzFeed’s own CEN-use documents, front-up records and the later Vienna/personal-safety chain, because it helps document a central contradiction: BuzzFeed was preparing to attack publishers for using CEN material while still trying to identify, update, relabel or delete its own CEN-linked content, and was shaping the final article’s emphasis before completing parts of the source-contact, charity and confrontation process.

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