AI Data Centers in the Land of Diminished Local News

“At least some of these big companies look for communities that are news deserts to build projects,” a local journalist said, “because it’s easier for them when there’s less public scrutiny.”

When he was a “punk-ass skater kid,” Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle the drainage ditches of El Paso, “a Wild West town upon which a modern city has been built,” as he’d later describe it. He loved the yellow poppies blooming on the side of the mountains, and a song by an El Pasoan who goes by Mr. Crazy Chuco Town: “I love my city, it’s that EPT.” Today, at age thirty, he works as an energy and environment reporter for El Paso Matters. He characterizes the journalism landscape in his area as not “the most robust” compared with, say, a coastal city where reporters compete to be the first to break a piece of news. Here, “if I’m not telling a story,” he told me, “no one else is sometimes.”