This week, The Loop visits Anuška Delić, founder and editor-in-chief of Oštro, a Slovenia-based investigative journalism project that covers the Adriatic region.

Oštro is based on 4 pillars: Investigative and data journalism, defending the right to information and developing future generations of journalists. The latter is first and foremost done by involving young journalists in fact-checking.

When founding Oštro, Anuška Delić knew that she wanted to include a fact-checking unit:

“In my former job, I realized so many times that we published things that could have been so much better, if someone spent an hour [on fact-checking]. But it didn’t exist in Slovenian media, we don’t even have a word in Slovenian for fact-checking.”

“So, we established the unit, and I quickly realized that it was excellent training. Through fact-checking, journalists learn a lot that they will not learn in school or in other Slovenian media. They learn to think critically, view and assess information, documents and sources. They learn how to navigate various databases, a lot of things. Eventually we start giving them small research tasks and they slowly progress towards investigating.”

Two dozen young journalists have been trained at Oštro this way, but unfortunately, many talented journalists leave the profession again, Delić says. The attitude towards journalism and media is toxic in SLovenia, and there are very bad verbal attacks and even threats towards journalists.

Listen to the episode to hear more about the fight against disinformation and hateful content, the education and re-education of journalists and the situation for media and non-profits in Slovenia and Croatia.