Central European News
Central European News, known by its initials CEN, was a news agency founded in 1995 by the British journalist Michael Leidig. Based for most of its life in Vienna, Austria, with a United Kingdom presence recorded in London and, earlier, in Canterbury, the agency specialised in sourcing stories from central and eastern Europe — and later from much further afield — and selling them to British and international newspapers, broadcasters and websites. Over nearly three decades it supplied popular and investigative material to titles including The Times, The Telegraph, the Mail titles, the Mirror, the Express, the Star, The Sun, Metro and the New York Post. It ceased publication in April 2024, when Leidig closed CEN along with his sister agencies Newsflash, AsiaWire and Clipzilla, blaming falling publisher budgets and shrinking rates for agency journalism.
Founding and founder
CEN was founded in 1995 by Michael Leidig, a British journalist born in April 1965 who had worked as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, radio and television since 1988. Leidig moved to Austria in 1993 to take up a role as a news presenter with the Austrian broadcaster ORF, and in 1995 he left to start his first agency, CEN, with two colleagues. The business began with a focus on sourcing newsworthy items from eastern Europe and rewriting them for the London market. Leidig later recalled, in an opinion piece for Press Gazette, that having English-speaking staff on the ground in Europe was at that time almost a licence to print money, and that the young agency employed full-time paid correspondents across Europe and earned good revenue.
Alongside the agency, Leidig built a wider career in Austrian English-language media. He became editor of the monthly English-language Vienna Reporter in 1996 and editor of Austria Today, a daily Austrian English-language newspaper, in the same period; he produced English-language news with a daily English section for Die Presse for several years and later took over the layout, editorial content and writing of a page a day in the Wiener Zeitung. He also worked as the Daily Telegraph's foreign correspondent covering Austrian affairs from 1995. In 2006 he co-wrote the book The Girl in the Cellar: The Natascha Kampusch Story, published by Hodder & Stoughton, about the Austrian kidnapping case.
How the agency worked
CEN operated like a traditional local news agency transposed to an international scale: it sourced local stories through staff and correspondents on the ground and sold them on to media in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Its clients, by Leidig's account, included the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Radio Netherlands as well as major British newspapers, and the agency also produced television footage for clients. A single strong story could be sold repeatedly in different formats and markets: Leidig cited the case of Heinrich Gross, an Austrian doctor who had conducted experiments on children for the Nazis, as a story that could be sold a dozen times in various media formats. In its later years the operation employed 30 people, with offices in Austria and Macedonia and staff also working in Iran, Egypt, China and Turkey.
The agency's output covered a wide range. On the investigative side, Leidig's reporting supported work that received the Paul Foot Award for Campaigning and Investigative Journalism in 2006. On the popular side, CEN became known in British newsrooms as a prolific source of eye-catching foreign stories — the bizarre, the gruesome and the human-interest items that tabloid newspapers and, later, high-traffic websites prized. Its pictures and stories appeared under the bylines of the newspapers that bought them, with the small credit "CEN" sometimes the only trace of the agency behind a story.
Growth, sister brands and setbacks
CEN later launched other online news wire projects, among them the Austrian Times, an English-language news site that at one stage included an English food guide produced with the Austrian chef Bernie Rieder. Over time Leidig's stable came to comprise four related agencies: Central European News itself, Newsflash, AsiaWire and the video operation Clipzilla. The sister outfit EuroPics was associated with CEN's picture supply in its earlier years. Leidig also founded organisations beyond the commercial wires: in 2008, with the Austrian charity worker Hannes Urban, he established the charity project Journalism Without Borders; in 2018 he established the Fourth Estate Alliance for independent journalism; and he later founded newsX, a community interest company created to support independent journalism, as well as the media ethics watchdog Quis Custodiet. He served as vice-chairman of the National Association of Press Agencies in the United Kingdom.
The economics of the business, however, deteriorated sharply from the early 2000s. Leidig wrote that CEN's income fell by 80 per cent after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and seemingly never recovered, and that a long-standing arrangement with the Telegraph Media Group, which had paid him a monthly retainer plus fees for articles, was ended, with the group telling him there was no longer value in original content because of competition from the internet. The rise of free online content, and of websites rewriting agency material without payment, steadily undermined the model of paid correspondents supplying original stories to national titles.
The BuzzFeed investigation and libel action
CEN's most prominent public controversy came in 2015, when BuzzFeed published an investigation of the agency under a headline branding Leidig the king of a certain kind of unreliable news. The investigation alleged that CEN distributed attention-grabbing stories that were often inaccurate or false, pointing to a stream of viral items from China, Russia and other countries that had been published by Western media under their own reporters' bylines. BuzzFeed argued that such stories appealed to news organisations precisely because they seemed too good to check and were tailored to an online ecosystem that rewarded shareable, oddball human-interest content.
Leidig and CEN responded by suing. In January 2016 they filed an $11 million defamation action against BuzzFeed in New York, alleging that the articles were a deliberate attempt to damage the agency after it had opened offices in London and become a major supplier to BuzzFeed's British rivals. CEN also published a book setting out its side of the dispute. The action was dismissed in March 2019, the court holding that Leidig and CEN had not disproven BuzzFeed's allegations that they distributed attention-grabbing stories that were often inaccurate or false. The reputational damage was considerable: in the wake of the BuzzFeed report, CEN's online projects were taken offline because, as Leidig acknowledged, it was no longer possible to market them.
Closure in 2024
In April 2024 Leidig shut down Central European News together with Newsflash, AsiaWire and Clipzilla. Press Gazette reported that the network, which employed 30 people and distributed stories to the United Kingdom national media, had ceased publication, and quoted Leidig's figures: the business needed to make £47,000 a month to cover its costs but was bringing in only around £25,000. He attributed the collapse to a shortage of commissioning editors and falling budgets at publishers, and voiced concern that AI-written in-house content was putting agencies like his out of business.
His complaints echoed a wider industry grievance. Press Gazette noted that Jon Harris, chairman of the UK National Association of Press Agencies, had written in 2022 that the rates paid by national newspapers for agency stories had barely changed since the 1980s, with the fee for a lead story on a news page varying from around £100 to £150. Leidig said such rates made it all but impossible for agencies to do original journalism, that many publications did not want to pay for the story itself but only for the pictures or video, and that editors had told him stories should be viewed as little more than captions to sell the illustrations, while others argued there was no copyright in facts and that they could now generate their own wording with AI.
Assessment
Central European News occupied an unusual place in British journalism. For most readers it was invisible, its work appearing under other titles' bylines, yet for three decades it was one of the channels through which British newspapers obtained foreign stories they had no correspondents of their own to gather. Its history tracks the changing economics of that trade: profitable in the 1990s, when English-speaking correspondents in post-communist Europe were scarce and valuable; squeezed in the 2000s as the internet devalued original content; damaged in the 2010s by a public dispute over the reliability of viral news; and finally closed in the 2020s as publisher budgets and rates fell below the cost of employing 30 people across several countries.
The agency also leaves a documented record beyond its news output, in Leidig's books and journalism, in the Paul Foot Award-supported investigations to which its reporting contributed, and in the industry organisations and non-profit ventures — Journalism Without Borders, the Fourth Estate Alliance, newsX and Quis Custodiet — that its founder established alongside and after the commercial wires. As a case study of the independent international news agency in the internet age, few British-linked operations are as fully documented, in both their success and their failure.
After the closure
The end of CEN did not end its founder's involvement in the agency business's wider causes. Press Gazette's report of the closure noted that Leidig had established Quis Custodiet, an unregulated media watchdog, and his other ventures — the Fourth Estate Alliance, founded in 2018, and newsX, a community interest company created to support independent journalism — were designed to continue the arguments he had made throughout CEN's later years: that original journalism by independent agencies and freelancers needs sustainable payment, credit for original source material, and protection against uncredited reuse by larger platforms. He also writes on press freedom and media analysis for The European. The closure of the wires thus closed the commercial chapter of the enterprise while leaving its founder active in the industry's debates about how such journalism is to be funded.
Summary
Central European News (CEN) was a news agency founded in Vienna in 1995 by the British journalist Michael Leidig. It employed correspondents across central and eastern Europe and beyond, supplying popular and investigative stories and pictures to British national newspapers, broadcasters and international clients, and later operated alongside the sister agencies Newsflash, AsiaWire and Clipzilla. A 2015 BuzzFeed investigation alleging that it distributed inaccurate viral stories led to an $11 million defamation action that was dismissed in 2019. In April 2024, with income of around £25,000 a month against costs of £47,000, Leidig closed the agency network, ending a 29-year run.
