MailOnline Picture Desk Source Slams CEN Stories But Admits She Has “Never Read A Full Story”

This 1 April 2015 BuzzFeed email chain shows Tom Phillips and Alan White discussing an anonymous MailOnline picture-desk source who had provided a strongly negative assessment of CEN material while acknowledging that MailOnline used CEN because its stories performed well online. The document is significant because the source says her “bosses would kill me if they knew I’d spoken about this”, says MailOnline was “flooded” with CEN emails daily, and adds that although she did not trust “a single bit” of CEN material, “their crazy stories bring in clicks so no one seems to care that much”. The statement is useful to BuzzFeed’s narrative, but it also contains an important limitation: the source admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever read full story from them”, meaning her sweeping view that much of the material was false appears to have been based largely on picture-desk impressions, captions, image quality and suspicion about collects rather than full reading, reporting or source-level verification of the stories themselves. The document should therefore be read alongside the likely Mirror-source material and BuzzFeed’s own CEN-use documents, because it shows BuzzFeed gathering damaging anonymous comments from staff inside rival publishers while also exposing the commercial reality that those publishers chose to use CEN material because it delivered traffic. It is also relevant that the source’s criticism blurs the responsibility line between agency supply and publisher selection: CEN supplied stories and images, but decisions about whether to publish, how prominently to present them, and whether to run sensitive images or videos were made by the publisher’s own newsroom.

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