Riddhi Setty of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian, a technology reporter who has spent a lot of time covering data centers.
Here is an excerpt:
RS: Can you tell me how you ended up on the data center beat?
MR: I cover technology, and Oregon’s big industry is semiconductors, and so it was sort of a natural transition over to data centers, which are, of course, run by semiconductors. As the data center industry emerged, we got some of Big Tech’s first data centers. The first one opened in Oregon twenty years ago, in the small city of The Dalles. At the time, they were kind of a novelty—it was unusual to have Silicon Valley end up in small towns—so we wrote a series of stories, probably over more or less a decade, looking at various aspects of that. But the landscape has changed over the past seven or eight years as the scale of the installations has increased considerably, and it’s begun to affect power, water, tax revenue, and the physical landscape of some communities. So our coverage has changed somewhat to keep people abreast of how this industry is changing the state.
How difficult has it been to cover data centers? What are some of your considerations, and how do you approach stories?
It’s a very interesting beat to cover because often we cover technology companies from the top down: “What is Google doing? What is Apple doing? What technologies are they investing in?” And this is really covering technology on the ground. I mean, literally, right? You have Big Tech operating in really small communities, and it can be challenging because, particularly in the early years, and in no small measure today, the tech companies want to remain very discreet about what they’re doing and how they’re operating, so even basic information like their water consumption has sometimes been challenging to get. The tech companies are also very far from the communities where they’re operating. There are no senior Meta or Apple executives in Prineville, Oregon, for example. So if you want to find out what they plan in these communities, getting through the bulwarks of corporate PR can be very difficult, and there’s only so much available in public records, and the companies will often fight to keep some of that information secret.
Read more here.
