Former Reporter Editor Lands Job At La Voz De Chatham
Heidi Perez-Moreno, who served as editor-in-chief of The Reporter during the 2019-20 school year, has landed a part-time position at the News + Record’s La Voz de Chatham project.
The bilingual publication was started by the News + Record in the summer of 2020. It highlights Hispanic stories and voices in Chatham County and Siler City in North Carolina.
Perez-Moreno, who previously served as a Spanish translator for The California Report, KQED, an NPR affiliate, and The Carolina Public Press, started as a reporter and translator at La Voz on Sept. 6.
“I’m really happy to gain experience doing reporting in Spanish,” Perez-Moreno said. “It’s one thing to interview sources in Spanish [and] see the final product in English, but it’s great to see the entire process through in my second language.”
This summer, Perez-Moreno was a reporting fellow at The Texas Tribune in Austin writing about Texas politics and public policy. The 21-year old is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring in journalism.
As a junior, she served as the diversity, equity and inclusion officer and assistant audience engagement editor at The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper. Perez-Moreno covered stories about first-generation students feeling isolated during UNC’s virtual semester, off-campus students struggling with internet access and undocumented immigrants who felt excluded from the vaccine process.
She is currently the publication’s editorial managing editor, overseeing the print product and editorial content.
Before transferring to UNC, Perez-Moreno was a news writer at The Reporter for two years. As a sophomore, she served as editor-in-chief and social media director of the paper, leading the staff through its pandemic coverage and starting the publication’s bi-weekly newsletter.
In July of 2019, she was named a College Media Association Pinnacle Awards finalist in the Best Breaking News Story category for a story she co-wrote about the Board of Trustees’ decision of restarting the College’s presidential search. The following year, she was named Reporter Of The Year in the Associated Collegiate Press’ two-year colleges’ category.
Her work has also won first-place awards from the Florida College System Publications Association for in-depth reporting and sports writing. The stories centered on the cost of hiring a new college president and a feature on a men’s basketball player who was adopted from an orphanage in Haiti when he was five years old.
