Blog

About Vanessa Otero

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.

Educator looking up articles to include in an information and media literacy curriculum

How to Incorporate News Literacy into Any Curriculum and Be Confident in Evaluating News Content from Any Source

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 →

October 27, 2020
Vanessa Otero
Academic, Featured, Information Literacy, Schools, Teachers

Dictionary definition of "conspiracy theory"

Teaching About Conspiracy Theories and Memes: The Internet’s Most Outlandish and Compelling Content

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 →

October 20, 2020
Vanessa Otero
Featured, Information Literacy, Teachers

Two silhouettes with a squiggle emerging from their mouths, representing the discussion of difficult political topics

Facing Polarization Head-On: Strategies for Discussing Difficult Political Topics When Teaching News Literacy

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 →

October 13, 2020
Vanessa Otero
Featured, Information Literacy, Teachers, Tools and Resources

Woman evaluating and assessing an article in a newspaper

How to Evaluate Any News Content for Reliability and Bias

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 →

October 6, 2020
Vanessa Otero
Featured, Information Literacy, Tools and Resources

Woman reading "The Daily Fake News" newspaper

Why It Is Challenging to Teach News Literacy in Today’s World, and How to Do So Effectively Anyway

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 →

August 4, 2020
Vanessa Otero
Featured, Information Literacy, Tools and Resources