Trusted Journalism.
Lasting Resilience.

A cross-border storytelling project covering the environmental fallout from the Kakhovka Dam terrorist attack. It maximized data journalism and regional expertise to address public fears fueled by Russian propaganda. The dam’s destruction by Russian occupation forces in June 2023 caused catastrophic flooding and unprecedented environmental damage. Russia denied responsibility and manufactured a wave of disinformation to confuse and fear-monger the affected societies.

SCIENCE+ facilitated a transborder effort by four newsrooms from the Black Sea region to feature the best regional expertise and on-the-ground reporting to fact-check the consequences for the Black Sea coastal areas. The project utilized science communication in accessible language, making complex environmental topics understandable for a broader audience.

Media partners saw unexpected audience interest in this project in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, and Latvia, demonstrating that the content resonated with and engaged a wide audience. The project successfully presented environmental and economic issues in clear, accessible language, making them easier to understand. Media partners reported particularly high interest among individuals aged 35 and older across the participating countries.

Amid the rising wave of skepticism among young people in Central Europe toward elections and the democratic process, we co-produced a series of projects with Slovak partners to explore how to engage politically disengaged youth with quality journalism. The stories were published ahead of the Slovak general elections in September 2023 and were designed to give young people a voice, placing them at the center of pre-election coverage.

The project aimed to help the younger generation of voters make conscious choices by delivering journalism in formats and spaces they naturally engage with. It reached millions, strengthened disinformation resilience among young Slovaks, spurred civic participation, and reshaped how Slovak media communicate with their youth audiences.

The presence of Ukrainian refugees in hosting countries has often been vilified by Russian propaganda to widen societal polarization. The SCIENCE+ approach blends human stories and quality expertise to fact-check the real impact of refugees on local societies and present a realistic picture of the many barriers that war survivors actually face in a new place. In this project, our Romanian partner covered the highly polarized topic of Ukrainian refugees’ access to the local labor market, framed by disinformation actors as «Ukrainians are stealing our jobs.»

SCIENCE+ facilitated a cross-border collaboration with a Czech newsroom to present the Romanian audience with a broader regional context of the challenges faced by Ukrainian refugee doctors and nurses in finding work in Romania—along with examples of how other EU countries have found scalable solutions. The article led the Romanian College of Physicians to initiate a proposal for legislative changes to help Ukrainian medical professionals gain employment in Romania.

Foreign-orchestrated disinformation campaigns often exploit food insecurity and related fears to fuel societal frustration with democratic institutions. In this project, together with a Polish partner, we deployed an innovative and audience-centred approach to address these concerns. Despite rising obesity rates in Poland, the topic of diets remains stigmatized, especially for women — often viewed as a personal weakness rather than a health issue. It is also a fertile ground for disinformation.

Together with the country’s leading nutritionists and psycho-dietitians from the Polish NGO ‘Kobiety bez Diety’ (Women without diets), Poland’s most popular news and talk radio station produced a series of science-based explanatory podcasts titled Jadłospisek (The Menu). The series was designed to break societal taboos and foster greater public trust in media reporting on health topics.

The podcast became one of the most popular non-air series on the Radio TOK FM platform, with over 25,000 listenings, mostly from mobile devices — in addition to an on-air broadcast audience of nearly 1 million.

Disinformation narratives are rarely isolated — they are interconnected across the region and often used as tools to gain political power. The mission of SCIENCE+ is to support our partners in addressing transborder disinformation spillovers before they escalate.

In collaboration with a leading independent Hungarian news portal, we tracked and exposed how the Hungarian government actively influences Hungarian-speaking minorities in Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. This influence is exercised through propaganda, including anti-Ukrainian and anti-EU messaging.

Audience surveys conducted as part of this project gave the newsroom unique insights into the perceptions of these minorities and the levels of trust in the media that spreads such narratives.