This March 2013 Press Gazette comment article by Michael Leidig explains the business model behind Central European News and the wider collapse in the value placed on original agency journalism. It records that CEN supplied both serious investigations and popular viral material, with its stories frequently appearing in the Most Read section on MailOnline, while also producing high-value original reporting for major newspapers, broadcasters and specialist outlets. The article is significant because it also describes a letter from The Telegraph saying it was cutting fees because there was no longer value in original content due to competition from the internet. That claim was especially revealing because The Telegraph was later celebrated for the MPs’ expenses scandal, one of the clearest modern examples of the public, commercial and democratic value of original reporting. The article therefore captures the contradiction at the heart of the later dispute: publishers still depended on original journalism when it produced reputation, impact and traffic, but increasingly treated the people and agencies who created that work as disposable. It is also relevant to the later BuzzFeed story because it openly identified CEN’s strength with MailOnline, a key target in the wider anti-tabloid and anti-viral-news climate in which BuzzFeed, Craig Silverman and Emily Bell later became connected to the narrative around CEN, fake news and the supposed dangers of viral agency content.