Affordable housing around Charlotte

Jasmin Herrera

Jasmin Herrera reports on affordable housing in Charlotte, North Carolina for La Noticia, the state’s largest Spanish-language paper. Herrera is a trilingual Mexican American journalist born in California and raised in North Carolina. She earned an associate degree at Central Piedmont Community College and holds a bachelor’s in media and journalism with a minor in social and economic justice from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As part of a multimedia team project covering the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and its devastating effects on Puerto Rico and its people, Herrera reported on the island’s fallen electrical grid and helped the team win the Online Journalism Awards’ top honor for student journalism in 2018 and earn second place in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ student awards. The judges deemed this multimedia project “a superior example of the potential of modern journalism.” Herrera has also interned with her local NPR affiliate and Creative Loafing Charlotte.

La Noticia

La Noticia, The Spanish-Language Newspaper, is the largest Spanish-language Newspaper in North Carolina. We have been serving the Latino community here for 22 years. We cover immigration, local and state government, politics and community news and events. Our readers are immigrants from Latin America who prefer to read in Spanish. They are new to the country and they rely on La Noticia to provide them with local news and information in their own language, that will help them make informed decisions and also help them adapt to the culture in the United States, in North Carolina and in the cities where we serve and they live.

Zila Sanchez

Zila Sanchez reports for La Noticia, the largest Spanish language publication in North Carolina, where she focuses on affordable housing, a huge issue in Charlotte. Low-income families find it hard to afford to live in the city anymore. The issue is even bigger in the Latino community where they face added challenges of abuse and discrimination, including eviction from apartments or mobile homes, no relocation assistance and many other issues. Sanchez is a Charlotte native who knows the area well. She was the editor-in-chief of North Carolina A&T State University’s independent student newspaper, The A&T Register. While on The Register, Sanchez led her team in creating a Primary Elections Voter Guide for all the public Historically Black Colleges and Universities in North and South Carolina. Sanchez was able to participate in the Poynter Institute’s College Media Project, the Black Narrative, where the staff explored biases within local news organizations that affect the public’s perspective. She was also a speaker at the 2019 National College Media Convention and N.C. Scholastic Media Association’s Summer Institute.  

La Noticia

La Noticia, The Spanish-Language Newspaper, is the largest Spanish-language Newspaper in North Carolina. We have been serving the Latino community here for 22 years. We cover immigration, local and state government, politics and community news and events. Our readers are immigrants from Latin America who prefer to read in Spanish. They are new to the country and they rely on La Noticia to provide them with local news and information in their own language, that will help them make informed decisions and also help them adapt to the culture in the United States, in North Carolina and in the cities where we serve and they live.