Little Rock paper lays off business reporter

Jessica Seaman, a business reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, was among those laid off by the newspaper.

The paper laid off eight employees, including five in the newsroom, according to this article.

On Facebook, Seaman wrote, “I learned a lot during the last few years and will miss working alongside some great journalists, especially those on the business desk. Can’t wait to see what’s next for me.”

Seaman was the energy reporter for the paper. She joined the newspaper in 2012, and covered Acxiom, Windstream and Murphy Oil. She’s written about the decline Arkansas’s gas shale formation, pipelines bursting in the Arkansas River, and the use of big data by law enforcement agencies during terrorist hunts.

She was part of a team that won a Green Eyeshade Award in disaster coverage in 2016 for the paper’s stories on floods and tornados that hit Arkansas in 2015. She was also part of a team that won a Green Eyeshade Award in 2014 for stories on an oil spill by an Exxon Mobil pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, in 2013.

A story she wrote with another reporter about the redevelopment of Main Street in Little Rock was awarded second place in 2014 by The Associated Press Managing Editors Association of Arkansas for Business Reporting.

In 2014, Seaman received the Wharton Aresty Institute of Executive Education Scholarship to attend the Wharton Seminars for Business Journalists at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.