Vanessa Otero is the creator of the Media Bias Chart®, the viral image that prompted many lively discussions around the internet about where people get their news. She is the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the company she founded in 2018 to fulfill the need revealed by the popularity of the Chart—the need for an easy-to-understand, reliable news rating system. Vanessa is a native of San Diego, CA, and currently resides in Westminster, CO. She has a B.A. in English from UCLA and a J.D. from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, and is a practicing patent attorney. As the founder of Ad Fontes Media, she seeks to impact the way consumers, educators, and organizations deal with today’s complex media landscape.
Though media and information literacy have been taught in various pedagogical settings in the past, the task had mostly fallen to those whose training was directly related to it, such... read more →
In this blog series, I have referred several times to the concept of “modern challenges” to teaching news literacy, and at the risk of sounding repetitive, I will refer again... read more →
There are a number of challenges to teaching news literacy today, not least of which is that news literacy inherently involves reading, well, the news. As we all know, our... read more →
The modern information landscape is flooded with thousands of news and “news-like” sources. The sheer volume of these sources presents a unique challenge to each one of us being news... read more →
There are many “unprecedented” things about the world today, and teaching news literacy in our current information environment is certainly one of them. Never before have there been so many... read more →