Finding a path from
data centers to news oases

As much as people hate them, it’s amazing how often they use them. Data centers have become the landfills of the 2020s. We scream “Not in my backyard!” but appear to have no problem keeping them in our pocket.

When you Google something, you’re using a data center. When you go on Facebook, you’re using a data center. Use ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or any of a host of other AI agents to write something or design a flyer, and you’re using a data center. Get GPS directions, send and receive email, even read this paper online, and you’re using a data center.

It’s not just data centers we clamor to use but want to keep out of sight. Turn on a light in America, and 10% of the brightness comes from wind farms, 18% from nuclear plants, and 9% from solar arrays.

We decry what online retailers and big-box stores have done to local economies but, like so many junkies hooked on a narcotic, can’t resist their lure.

Maybe this is why our president wants Greenland so badly. We can put these things there, like Massa confining his slaves to shacks on the edge of his plantation. And we can throw in workers, willing to do jobs Americans won’t touch, who cross our borders in search of the American dream.

If we truly want to stop data centers, we can start by unplugging from the Internet. If we want to stop online and big-box retailers, we can pay a little more — and drive and use data a little less — by shopping at home. We can get rid of wind farms by stopping wasting energy. But, of course, we won’t. We’d be spitting in the wind if we tried.

Spitting in the wind is something we at the Record have been doing for the past few months, but we’re happy to say the blowback has been anything but unpleasant.

For four months, we at the paper and you who read it have been beneficiaries of honorable and unrecognized heroism by a series of veteran journalists led by Clara Germani.

In her career as a top-level journalist, Clara had no connection to Marion County. Yet she volunteered to come here, almost entirely at her own expense — and encouraged others to do the same — when she learned that this paper, like many others, was having trouble finding talented journalists willing to relocate to small, rural communities.

She brought us Doug Struck for all of July and Mary Jacobs, who’s been here off and on this summer. And they’ve helped encourage and develop our newest staffer, Owen Prothro, who’s well on his way to a career likely to be as celebrated as those of the retirees he’s been working alongside.

Next week will be Clara’s last with us. Her husband, who graciously allowed her to follow her dream to try to save journalism in places poised to become news deserts, would like to have her back at their home in Southern California.

But her efforts — and ours — to bring journalistic oases to that desert won’t stop. Even without our retiree reinforcements, we’ll continue to have Owen and Judd Weil and Nicholas Kimball and others — a larger news staff than at nearly all surrounding newspapers, most of them gobbled up by profiteering chains that care not a whit about the communities they serve.

Years ago, my father used to claim that the best way we could promote our own subscription sales was to buy our readers subscriptions to nearby newspapers. Next time you’re in one of those big-box stores, pick up what used to be the daily paper in that town, see what’s happened to it, and compare it to the paper in your hands.

Things are so bad elsewhere that the sole staffer — since let go — at a once-prestigious nearby daily complained that the distant center that designed her paper’s pages misspelled the name of the town a dozen times in three months. Her employer’s response was to tell the design center to stop sending her page proofs.

Clara and the Record may be spitting in the wind, but we’re working on plans we hope will change that. Clara is trying to encourage other retirees to volunteer to help in rural newsrooms, and we’re trying to establish a fellowship program that will attract the best and brightest young journalists like Owen to consider working in rural communities for at least a year and, if all works to plan, be mentored by veterans that Clara’s efforts might help secure.

We’re trying, not unlike other efforts like Report for America, to restore the essential place journalism plays in creating an informed and engaged electorate for democracy’s sake.

Those in power like to decry journalism, but we’ve seen what happens when journalism is weakened. Perhaps the only way to solve such problems is to bolster local newspapers that care not only about your town’s name but also the name of your kid who scored a touchdown — something local businesses should consider when deciding where to spend their advertising dollars.

Which would you rather see them do: support data centers that drive social and online media or contribute to creating an oasis for journalism in areas that are in danger of becoming news deserts?

— ERIC MEYER