Felicia Crețu is an editorial fact-checker, based in Moldova. She is working for CU SENS Media Project, an independent media organisation from the Republic of Moldova specializing in video investigations. Previously, she has been an investigative journalist for several years. Her reporting was recognised both locally and internationally.
In 2022, her story exposing the hideout of Ilan Shor – a sanctioned Kremlin proxy and Moldova’s most-wanted fugitive, found at a luxury villa in Israel – placed second in Investigative Journalism at Romania’s leading journalism award.
She was named ” Journalist of the Year ” twice, in 2020 and 2022, in Moldova.
Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions
Fact-Checking – hate the process, love the reputation. A survival guide to solid evidence
This 1,5-hour training introduces the core principles and practical workflow of fact-checking in journalism. Participants will learn the standards of evidence and source verification needed to get an investigation past editorial fact-checking, which helps prevent legal risks and protects the outlet’s credibility with readers, with an emphasis on:
- understanding why fact-checking, in which every single statement in a piece is checked word by word against its primary source, matters and what line-by-line fact-checking means (the OCCRP standard),
- applying the “primary source only” rule when checking names, numbers, quotes, addresses, dates, descriptions, and background claims,
- documenting evidence properly through detailed footnotes and screenshots, and
- recognizing when a second independent source is needed to back up a claim.
In the practical part, participants will be given a sentence taken from a real investigation done by our organization, along with the actual evidence collected for it. They will be asked whether they think the evidence is sufficient to support the sentence as written and encouraged to propose a safer, more accurate reformulation, one that states only what the evidence actually proves.
The session will end with insight into the editorial hierarchy – reporter, editor, and fact-checker and clarifying who has the final say over content versus the final say over accuracy.