Triad Biz Journal hires innovation/tech reporter

Jessica Seaman, a former business reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, has been hired by the Triad Business Journal, an American City Business Journals paper based in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Seaman started Thursday. Her beat is innovation and technology, with an emphasis on health care and life sciences.

Seaman was the energy reporter for the Little Rock paper before she was laid off earlier this year. She joined the newspaper in 2012, and covered Acxiom, Windstream and Murphy Oil. She’s written about the decline of 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 tornadoes 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.