Jessica LeBlanc, a student anchor reporter for the Southeastern Channel, has been named as one of the four finalists for the “Best News Reporting” award of the 2011 College Broadcasters National Student Production (CBNSP) competition for her story “Tracking Disease Trends on Twitter.”

“It’s such a big honor for me,” said LeBlanc. “It’s great to think back when I was a freshman and had zero experience in this area, and then to come to the Southeastern Channel and growing as much as  I have.”

The story was presented last year as a segment of the newscast “Northshore News,” which occupies two of the four finalist spots for the “Best Television Newscast” award, also of the CBNSP competition.

“My angle was to just cover the facts and what Dr. [Aaron] Culotta and his graduate students were doing,” said LeBlanc. “I wanted to show people how the trends were being tracked through Twitter. If people can do that, we can track them quicker and faster, we can keep people from getting sick.”

The Society of Professional Journalists also recognized LeBlanc’s story in the Mark of Excellence awards last year, which took second place.

According to a 2010 Southeastern press release, Culotta and two student assistants studied over 500 million Tweets over an eight-month period, using Twitter’s application programming interface (API). By using keywords to track rates of influenza-related messages on Twitter, the team was able to forecast influenza rates. Collecting this data from hospitals, clinics and other sources is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming approach, but by monitoring a social networks such as Twitter, researchers can capture comments from people with the flu, or other infectious diseases, who are sending out status messages.

 “I think the type of story that it was, something that is relevant to the entire country, is why it got so much attention,” said LeBlanc. ” It explained how diseases can be monitored online and how that can help with treatment, so it definitely concerns the public’s health. I think the content of the story, the writing and the way it was approached is what made it a success.”

According to LeBlanc, the results of the contest will be announced in late October.

LeBlanc is a junior mass communications major and became involved with the channel in 2010 as a work-study student and was hired as a student worker the following spring. Since beginning her career at the channel, LeBlanc was recognized by the Southeastern Journalism Conference as Best Anchor in February.

Before television, LeBlanc tried her hand with print and has several stories published on UPIU.com, a news site that publishes material produced by college journalists from around the world. Currently, LeBlanc is participating in an investigative reporting internship with Fox 8 Live’s Lee Zurick.

After graduating from Southeastern LeBlanc plans to have a career in news television, but she says it’s a possibility that those plans may change.

“I want to cover political news, but I think I’ll go to law school after I graduate,” said LeBlanc. “Right now, I’m not really sure. Decisions, decisions, decisions.”