{"id":259382,"date":"2026-04-21T11:31:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T11:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/259382\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T11:31:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T11:31:06","slug":"ai-data-centers-in-the-land-of-diminished-local-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/259382\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Data Centers in the Land of Diminished Local News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sign up for the daily <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cjr.org\/email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">CJR newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">When he was a \u201cpunk-ass skater kid,\u201d Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle the drainage ditches of El Paso, \u201ca Wild West town upon which a modern city has been built,\u201d as he\u2019d 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: \u201cI love my city, it\u2019s that EPT.\u201d 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 \u201cthe most robust\u201d compared with, say, a coastal city where reporters compete to be the first to break a piece of news. Here, \u201cif I\u2019m not telling a story,\u201d he told me, \u201cno one else is sometimes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That is pretty much what happened in 2023. No one, including Mendoza-Moyers, caught wind of a story that would later become major news: a deal that the City of El Paso made with Meta, which was operating under a holding company called Wurldwide LLC. The plan was to build a data center, a facility designed to train and deploy artificial intelligence models, requiring tremendous power and liquid cooling. Meta\u2019s commitment at the time was to spend eight hundred million dollars on construction. They\u2019re going to pay taxes, Mendoza-Moyers remembered the general understanding being. But, in fact, the company received thirty-five years\u2019 worth of tax abatements. \u201cOur economic development department and our elected officials in El Paso showered Meta with all these tax breaks that, I think, if they came now, wouldn\u2019t be negotiated,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Meta emerged with a partnership around the same time with El Paso Water, a big local utility, and promised the region fifty low-wage jobs (though that number later rose to three hundred). A local advocacy group claimed that nondisclosure agreements had been signed, otherwise veiling the plans in secrecy. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment.) That is not uncommon, in such cases: according to Erik Bonds and Viktor Newby, a professor and a student of sociology, respectively, at the University of Mary Washington, in a study of data centers being built in Virginia, at least twenty-five of the total thirty-one in their sample had used NDAs with local governments. \u201cDemocracy\u2014some say\u2014dies in the dark,\u201d Bonds and Newby wrote. \u201cBut that is exactly where many data center deals are born and live.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The arrival of a data center in El Paso was, many agreed, a complicated situation. It might be hard for some in this region to turn down any glimmer of investment. \u201cIn El Paso, we\u2019re always so desperate for any industry not to pass us over,\u201d Mendoza-Moyers said. Sara Sanchez, a staff writer for El Paso Inc., a business-community-focused paper, told me that the city has long been in transition, \u201ctrying to figure out what our next big economic driver is going to be.\u201d In 1997, the El Paso Times characterized the city as the \u201cNumber One Job Loser\u201d in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which an academic argued had caused \u201csevere pauperization\u201d of large swaths of the city, particularly those involved in what had been a gigantic garment industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Local journalism, in the intervening years, alternately withered and bloomed. The once-giant El Paso Herald Post closed in 1997. Operating today are the newish: El Paso Matters, a nonprofit founded in 2019; the El Paso Times, owned by Gannett, and subject in recent years to major layoffs, as well as shifting its printing across the border, to Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez; El Paso Inc., the small, business-focused paper; KTEP, a university-owned radio station; KVIA, an ABC and CW affiliate; El Diario de El Paso, a daily Spanish-language newspaper based in Mexico; and KTDO, a Telemundo station, among others. Some of them didn\u2019t respond to my requests to talk about data center coverage; Tim Archuleta, the executive editor of the El Paso Times, pointed me to the work of Vic Kolenc, a business reporter assigned to cover the Meta data center. \u201cWe are tracking many developments related to the center and providing updates when significant developments surface,\u201d Archuleta said via email. Jesus Rodriguez, from KVIA, noted that, \u201cas with many large corporate developments, detailed information is often limited in the early stages since it\u2019s managed by private companies,\u201d and described a reliance on public records. Springing up amid this patchwork is also Real FitFam El Paso, an Instagram page with nearly seven hundred thousand followers that various El Pasoans have described as a major news source. (When it was temporarily shut down by Meta, a commenter asked, \u201cDon\u2019t they understand this [is] our local news channel??\u201d) Despite the relatively numerous outlets, the deal with Meta, via Wurldwide LLC, came as a surprise to most El Pasoans\u2014a testament to the challenge of covering a story shrouded in NDAs and economic need.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Heath Haussamen, an independent journalist in nearby Do\u00f1a Ana County\u2014over the New Mexico state line, and home to another data center project, Project Jupiter\u2014characterized his neighboring area as even more of a news desert. There\u2019s him, writing at Haussamen.com. There are papers headquartered many hours away, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The Las Cruces Sun-News, owned by Gannett, told me that its first piece of reporting on Project Jupiter was an article by Jessica Onsurez\u2014\u201cWhat\u2019s a Data Center?\u201d\u2014spotlighting those with environmental objections to a deal that was being brokered between the State of New Mexico and BorderPlex Digital Assets. (\u201cWho\u2019s ever heard of them?\u201d Mendoza-Moyers asked, rhetorically, of the company.) As it turned out, the five-billion-dollar plan for a \u201cdigital infrastructure campus,\u201d which became a 165-billion-dollar sketch for Project Jupiter, wasn\u2019t even really owned by BorderPlex. Behind the scenes were OpenAI and Oracle\u2014mentioned not once in the initial Project Jupiter announcement, nor, as a result, in Onsurez\u2019s article about it. The construction would take place near Santa Teresa, on the New Mexico side of the El Paso metro area: a \u201cfrontline, fence-line community,\u201d as Kacey Hovden, a Las Cruces\u2013based lawyer at the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, put it to me. \u201cI don\u2019t even think this is an assertion,\u201d Haussamen said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a fact that at least some of these big companies look for communities that are news deserts to build projects like these, because it\u2019s easier for them when there\u2019s less public scrutiny, and I don\u2019t think that they expected the news coverage they got here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s now been nearly three years since the Meta deal went through. Much in El Paso and its environs has changed. Saul Gonzalez, an organizer with Sembrando Esperanza, a local activist group, told me that utility prices have gone up for residents. AI is a more visible industry, and more data centers are appearing in more places. Mendoza-Moyers is beginning to dig into new questions. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to be really honest with readers and listeners,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not, like, up at night like, Oh man, I really screwed that up,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s like, I probably could have focused a little bit more. Let\u2019s pay attention to stuff like that a little bit closer and really, you know, scour the agendas of our water utility and city council for these kinds of economic development agreements with some more detail.\u201d In late March, Meta announced that it would invest five hundred thousand dollars into a workforce development grant in partnership with local El Paso schools; more recently, and likely in response to community pressure, the El Paso city government heard a legal presentation on the potential costs of breaking the contract with Wurldwide\/Meta\u2014a number that might exceed a billion dollars. In 2023, Mendoza-Moyers told me, no one really knew what AI\u2019s infrastructural needs were. In 2026, everyone is more aware\u2014which is not to say the battered infrastructure of local journalism is up to the task.<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">From Albuquerque, four hours northwest of the El Paso area, Joshua Bowling of SourceNM, an affiliate of States Newsroom, the country\u2019s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, spoke to me about the difficulties of reporting on data centers. He\u2019d been following the development of Project Jupiter, among others. \u201cThese are massive corporate interests that have billions of dollars on the line to get this infrastructure up and running as quickly as possible, and communities, I feel like, at least in the case of Do\u00f1a Ana County, they don\u2019t really have a lot of time to understand why OpenAI wants to set up in their community so quickly and at such a large scale,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Sign up for CJR\u2019s daily email<\/p>\n<p>Recently, Bowling broke a story about a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/sourcenm.com\/2026\/03\/04\/a-secretive-ad-campaign-calls-on-new-mexicans-to-support-controversial-project-jupiter-data-center\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">secretive ad campaign<\/a>\u201d in support of Project Jupiter landing in mailboxes across New Mexico and also on the front pages of the Albuquerque Journal, the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Las Cruces Sun-News. The group behind the campaign, Elevate New Mexico, featured a smiling stock model who has also appeared, Bowling noted, on an unrelated dentistry website, as well as a brochure for the League of Arizona Cities and Towns. \u201cWhat I have kept a particular eye on,\u201d Bowling told me, \u201cis the transparency and accountability.\u201d Bowling was not able to determine who, exactly, was behind the Elevate New Mexico ads, though he found that some had been paid for by a public affairs and communications firm named APCO Worldwide LLC, which has a \u201cdata center advisory services\u201d division. (APCO did not comment for Bowling\u2019s piece, nor did it respond when I reached out.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt behooves us all to know when there\u2019s an outside actor seeking to sway public opinion,\u201d Bowling told me. \u201cAnd we have not had a lot of clear answers in the last six or so months as to who is behind these deals. Who\u2019s driving them? The BorderPlex Digital Assets website, at one point, took down its leadership page, so you couldn\u2019t even see who the company\u2019s executives are, and you have to go on the Internet Archive and find an old version of the website to see who\u2019s on it.\u201d BorderPlex did not respond to my request for comment; nor did OpenAI or STACK Infrastructure, another company involved with Project Jupiter. Oracle provided a statement: \u201cOur data center in New Mexico is expected to generate 4,000 construction jobs, as well as more than 1,500 permanent jobs\u2014including technicians, engineers, security, and logistics professionals\u2014onsite or in the community once construction is completed. Local suppliers, vendors, contractors and residents will be prioritized.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>About a decade ago, Bowling was a suburban city hall reporter at the Arizona Republic, in Phoenix. He covered the interest, among the administrators of various bedroom communities, in attracting data centers: \u201cThe argument was, \u2018Well, Microsoft is going to get us on the map, and that\u2019s going to let us attract other big employers.\u2019\u201d He had some d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu looking into Project Jupiter. \u201cYou start to see some of the same community investment promises that are made,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know, donations to the schools, things of that nature.\u201d Soon, Bowling would be appearing with journalists from India and Bangladesh, at a Society for Environmental Journalists conference panel on the challenges of data center reporting. \u201cIt\u2019s very jargon-heavy,\u201d Bowling said, of utility and environmental-impact lingo. \u201cWhen you start talking about gigawatts and megawatts and dekatherms, and all of these different units of measure for power, that is, in and of itself, very confusing, and I don\u2019t think necessarily always the most helpful to readers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In a sense, data center stories can be difficult to tell because they attempt to convey something about the future when the past remains obscured and the present is sliding by fast. Project Jupiter and the Meta data center are both still relatively speculative: neither is yet up and running, and the City of El Paso recently released a climate action plan that Mendoza-Moyers <a href=\"https:\/\/elpasomatters.org\/2026\/03\/19\/el-paso-texas-climate-change-weather-clima-dust-data-center-city-council\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reported on<\/a>, noting changes to the plans for the data center and its emissions. The city is now holding \u201clistening sessions\u201d with irate residents. Still, in late March, Meta announced that its El Paso data center was expanding to be a ten-billion-dollar facility. It was an investment increase of \u201cover sixfold,\u201d CNBC reported. \u201cThey are going to strip our city of natural resources, pollute our air, and increase our utility bills,\u201d wrote a Google Reviews user under the name Jonathan Z, giving one star to the Meta center. I noted the future tense, and wondered to myself: Is it possible to report on the future when you have only certain scraps of historical information?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mendoza-Moyers seemed to take that question to heart early this month on the <a href=\"https:\/\/elpasomatters.org\/2026\/04\/03\/meta-ai-data-center-el-paso-texas-podcast-water-electricity-rates\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">podcast<\/a> he hosts for El Paso Matters, discussing, with a colleague, the ins and outs of what this data center meant for El Paso, along several lines: the electrical grid, the potential tax revenue, the recent increase in energy rates (which Mendoza-Moyers clarified was not from the data center, but from other moves by El Paso Electric four or five years ago), water usage, and air pollution\u2014something that had been, in Mendoza-Moyers\u2019s view, relatively \u201cglossed over.\u201d Meta was promising that El Paso would essentially save money on electricity. The company would be building its own electrical-generation facility, called the McCloud Generation Plant, with the help of El Paso Electric\u2014and paying the cost for a \u201cbridge period\u201d of one to five years, after which the McCloud facility\u2019s costs would spread out to the general El Paso public, pending approval by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. \u201cWe need to interrogate that more, explore the numbers,\u201d Mendoza-Moyers said.<\/p>\n<p>Haussamen, for his part, has been filing public records requests to the state and county, which confirmed the existence of NDAs. Quickly, his coverage of Project Jupiter also became kind of meta, so to speak: not just the narrative of the data center\u2019s construction, but the narrative of his own reporting about it. \u201cThe state\u2019s Economic Development Department, to put it mildly, has been resistant to my efforts,\u201d he wrote on his website. He posted a timeline of Project Jupiter\u2013related events, as well as various documents he\u2019d obtained. His coverage disclosed, too, that he is married to Sarah Silva\u2014a state representative who supports Project Jupiter, and who wrote an op-ed about it in El Paso Matters with her colleagues Nathan Small and Joanne Ferrary. The group highlighted a man named Hugo, \u201ca skilled construction worker in Chaparral, who wants to stay close to his aging parents and keep hosting big family cookouts. But he doesn\u2019t want to break his back for a job that doesn\u2019t even pay his bills. Hugo knows his labor is worth more than the low wages he\u2019s currently offered. We all know young people like Hugo\u2014folks who want to build their lives here but worry about their financial prospects.\u201d Project Jupiter, the lawmakers argued, would allow Hugo to stay and find work at the data center.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Haussamen, in turn, published <a href=\"https:\/\/haussamen.com\/2025\/10\/12\/project-jupiters-big-promises-are-legally-binding\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a piece<\/a> on his site noting that Project Jupiter\u2019s \u201cbig promises are legally binding,\u201d spelling out for readers exactly how many jobs, at what salaries, were being dangled. As with the Meta center, the jobs numbers at Project Jupiter have, notably, changed, though in the other direction: Haussamen reported that \u201cthe companies intend to hire 750 full-time and 50 part-time employees within three years of commencing operations of the data centers. During construction, the companies project hiring 2,500 employees.\u201d But a later <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tricityrecordnm.com\/articles\/court-filing-appears-to-contradict-project-jupiters-promised-job-figures\/#\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">report <\/a>from Bowling, drawing on a court filing, noted that those numbers had gone down to \u201cat least 800\u201d jobs. When we spoke, Haussamen expressed support for the economic fuel that a data center could provide, but told me that he had concerns: \u201cProject Jupiter talked a good game about local jobs, but one of the first things they did was hire a company from Kansas to come level the dirt for this site, and so they imported a bunch of workers.\u201d He took a picture of a Project Jupiter construction truck passing through Do\u00f1a Ana County recently, flashing Kansas plates. \u201cWas there really not an El Paso construction company that could have done that?\u201d Haussamen mused. \u201cI don\u2019t know the answer to that.\u201d In any case, Hugo from Chaparral didn\u2019t seem to be driving.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, Haussamen said, his Project Jupiter coverage has represented \u201cthe first time I ever thought that a Web-based news organization might actually be able to fill the readership, like the local readership, that newspapers no longer do.\u201d That was an upside. \u201cIt\u2019s just been a void all across America, and I have started more than one news organization,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019ve started a nonprofit, a for-profit, and I\u2019ve always found it very difficult to replace a newspaper. My articles about Project Jupiter were shared so widely in this community that people at the grocery store or just random places would see my name and say, \u2018Wait, are you the guy who wrote that story?\u2019 And would tell me, \u2018You\u2019re the only one. I was trying to figure out about this.\u2019 And they saw your article on Facebook, or it was shared by a friend, or that video you put on Instagram, and thank you, because you\u2019re the only one who was doing that. It was the first time I really thought, Maybe we can build something out of the ashes of what private equity and other big corporations have done to journalism in America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">These days, for most data center coverage, the framing is environmental. This may be for any number of reasons: environmental concerns are real; many of us live in already environmentally imperiled communities at a moment of rampant deregulation; environmental stakes can make the tanglings of larger corporate domination, at the local and national levels, more legible. One statistic\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/technology\/2024\/09\/18\/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reported by the Washington Post<\/a>, often referenced\u2014is that an email composed with the help of generative AI uses the equivalent of a bottle\u2019s worth of water. More Data Centers, More Environmental Problems? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nwf.org\/Magazines\/National-Wildlife\/2025\/Fall\/Conservation\/AI-Data-Centers\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">asked<\/a> the National Wildlife Federation last year. \u201cEven a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town,\u201d wrote the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. A Bloomberg article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/graphics\/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">spotlighted<\/a> how \u201cAI is draining water from areas that need it most.\u201d \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/07\/14\/technology\/meta-data-center-water.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door<\/a>,\u201d announced the New York Times, in an article about Jeff and Beverly Morris, whose house sits a thousand feet from a Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, and whose well ran dry, choked by sediment. \u201cA data center like Meta\u2019s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day,\u201d the article reported. El Paso\u2019s Meta data center, in its contract with the city, planned to use up to 750,000 gallons per day.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, Bowling investigated the air quality permits filed by the forces behind Project Jupiter, and wrote that the greenhouse gas emissions from the facility would be greater than those from Albuquerque and Las Cruces\u2014New Mexico\u2019s two largest cities\u2014combined. \u201cPair that with the context that Sunland Park and Do\u00f1a Ana County have for years had some of the worst air quality in the country, particularly as it relates to ozone, and the greenhouse gases that we\u2019re talking about emitting here are important ingredients in making ozone,\u201d he said. \u201cSo will this stand to make already some of the worst air in the country even worse and even more unlivable for people who have respiratory problems and other illnesses? That is a major accountability question.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The other local reporters I talked with expressed a sense of resistance, however, to framing data centers as \u201cjust\u201d a matter of environmental concern. \u201cYou have not seen me covering this as an environmental story,\u201d Haussamen said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s intentional.\u201d (Even so, Haussamen does publish on environmental subjects, including water use.) Mendoza-Moyers told me that his reporting on the power plants that both the Meta data center and Project Jupiter said they\u2019d use has led him to believe that the environmentalist narrative about their being catastrophic to water supplies and air quality is not fully true. \u201cIs it an environmental story?\u201d he asked. \u201cA little bit. But to me, as I\u2019ve looked into it more, I think it\u2019s almost more like a story of, like, corporate power and these big companies showing up many times in Middle America communities,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, hey, these big companies show up, they\u2019ve got the Yale-educated lawyers and the really expensive law firms, and they just kind of outwit, out-negotiate, these local elected officials in Do\u00f1a Ana County.\u201d The \u201cbigger issues,\u201d he added, are \u201cthe power dynamics of big tech companies coming here, to a region desperate for investment in industry, and getting a lot of benefits and tax breaks without really committing to a lot of benefits for El Paso.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mendoza-Moyers\u2014who is now pursuing a master\u2019s program in utility economics and regulation at New Mexico State, in order \u201cto know what the hell I\u2019m talking about,\u201d as he told me\u2014sees utilities as an \u201cunderappreciated ballet of math and science and finance and all this stuff coming together to improve our lives.\u201d In December of 2025, he published an <a href=\"https:\/\/elpasomatters.org\/2025\/12\/02\/el-paso-texas-meta-data-center-water-usage\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> drawn from an interview with John Balliew, the CEO of El Paso Water, that broke down the Meta data center\u2019s likely usage statistics. \u201cEverybody\u2014the county and the city\u2014[felt] that this is a good economic investment for the city. Then we went ahead and did what needed to be done,\u201d Balliew said, of the city\u2019s agreement with Meta. \u201cBut we can\u2019t do this a lot,\u201d he continued, in Mendoza-Moyers\u2019s article, speaking of the water consumption. \u201cI don\u2019t think we could do another one.\u201d On the El Paso Matters podcast, Mendoza-Moyers interviewed Gilbert Trejo, the vice president of engineering, operations, and technical services for El Paso Water, who similarly asserted that the utility was \u201cin a great spot.\u201d Commenters, on the Instagram and Facebook reposts of these interviews, didn\u2019t tend to believe it.<\/p>\n<p>There are limits and there are potentialities. \u201cI try to put the water consumption into the broader context of the supply we have,\u201d Mendoza-Moyers told me. \u201cI did the math, right? Okay, El Paso Water thinks Meta\u2019s data center use is, like, four hundred thousand gallons of water a day. That\u2019s a decent amount. But in a system that uses a hundred and ten million gallons, you know, that\u2019s less than half a percent. That\u2019s not going to change everything.\u201d (A similar angle was taken in a Grist story digging into Arizona\u2019s water supply and data center water use, where Jake Bittle found not much there there, and quoted Sarah Porter, a fellow at Arizona State\u2019s Kyl Center for Water Policy: \u201cThere\u2019s not a hair-on-fire context right now.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Part of the promise from Meta is that its data center is of a kind that actually doesn\u2019t use that much water: if built in the way the company plans, it would use less than, say, a Department of Homeland Security detention center being rapidly constructed in El Paso and meant to \u201chouse\u201d eighty-five hundred people, which El Paso Water seems trepidatious about its ability to service. Amid so much degradation to a place and its people, it makes sense, maybe, that promises only go so far\u2014especially those made behind closed doors. To report on the intricacies of these deals requires a nearly unbelievable level of questioning and context.<\/p>\n<p>North of El Paso, in Do\u00f1a Ana County, sits the Organ Mountains\u2013Desert Peaks National Monument. Haussamen hikes there often: rocks spike vigorously up from the floor of the Chihuahuan Desert, and petroglyphs line the canyons. In his telling, there are some locals who bought land here, built houses, and then advocated for the place to become a national monument so that others couldn\u2019t build there next. \u201cJournalism should be really deeply invested in a community,\u201d he told me. \u201cWhen you\u2019re not, you tell stories the way that power wants them told. And that can be different types of power. So in this case, it could be the way that BorderPlex Digital and Oracle want the story to be told. Or it could be the way that environmental groups that are primarily concerned about climate change want the story to be told. And it\u2019s not that I reject any of that. It\u2019s that I think telling a story one of those two ways lacks the nuance that is the reality for people who actually live in these communities.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Mendoza-Moyers, for his part, has been feeling pessimistic about AI generally, \u201cconcerned about the audience\u2019s willingness to engage with a deeply reported story.\u201d He\u2019s thought often of the infamous quiz at the New York Times that polled readers\u2019 preferences: Cormac McCarthy or AI-generated prose? (It\u2019s a nearly even split.) Jokingly, he answered my question about what, infrastructurally, would allow local journalists to cover AI and data center\u2013related news: \u201cIf Bill Gates or somebody wanted to give El Paso Matters, like, a hundred million dollars,\u201d he said, \u201cthen we could hire ten reporters. That would be cool.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by <a href=\"https:\/\/members.cjr.org\/member\/?a=interior-hasamerica&amp;utm_source=cjr-org&amp;utm_medium=cjr-interior&amp;utm_campaign=m-land\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">joining CJR today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. When he was a \u201cpunk-ass skater kid,\u201d Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-259382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}