A support group and a lab in the St. Louis area provide resources for people with the allergy to mammal products — and evidence that its effects can be reversed.
A special reporting project from the Desk and the Missouri School of Journalism scrutinizes the national push for more data centers.
The past few years have seen the proliferation of data centers across the Mississippi River Basin. Once concentrated on the outskirts of urban areas, these facilities have grown in scale as they’ve crept across the countryside, bringing with them city-sized demands for resources and reshaping the landscape. Developers promise jobs for local residents, and they say the rollout of cloud computing and artificial intelligence means that the market for data centers is practically limitless.
The boom has taken many communities by surprise. Zoning and environmental laws have lagged behind project proposals, and state legislatures have largely neglected to place limits on the industry. That has led to heated fights involving residents fearful of the impact data centers will have on their communities, developers eager to see their projects approved and local officials forced to rule without much prior knowledge of technology. The decline of local media has compounded those challenges.
That’s why the Ag & Water Desk partnered with students at the Missouri School of Journalism to produce “When Data Centers Come Knocking,” a four-part series on data centers and local communities. The Desk’s executive director, Sara Shipley Hiles, tasked reporters in her capstone reporting class with looking beyond surface-level confrontation and at root causes.
“I wanted to get away from angry meeting coverage,” Hiles said. “I felt like that was shallow. … It doesn’t help anybody.”
The team went beyond the one-off coverage that journalists are often criticized for. They told the story of how a handful of ordinary people in central Missouri are filling the information gap, attending government meetings, filing public records requests at their own expense and setting up online forums to keep their neighbors informed. Hiles' students pulled back the curtain on the middlemen who broker data center deals — often after having been hired by the communities themselves. They explained how state legislatures have failed to act on data centers, leaving local governments to fend for themselves. And they put together a community toolkit that offers expert advice on how to shape data center proposals so they’re beneficial to all.
The community toolkit alone has already appeared in close to 100 publications nationwide, from Florida to Washington state. All pieces are free to republish by news outlets. Interested outlets are welcome to sign up to receive access to these and other Desk stories. Members of the public can receive a weekly newsletter with our latest stories.
Credits for the package include:
Reporting by Dylan Barbee, Finnegan Belleau, Max Quinn, Sophie Rentschler, Sterling Sewell, Jacob Tukker and Abigail Cornell.
Photos by Le Chen, Abigail Cornell, William Firra (KOMU), Nolan Haberstroh and Jeremy Housewright (Warren County Record).
Thanks to Missouri Business Alert and the Columbia Missourian for editorial, production and web support.
We interviewed more than 50 experts to create a community toolkit. It lays out how ordinary people can respond — and how communities can prepare to handle projects beforehand.
Private consultants connect local governments with companies looking to build data centers. They’re often paid by taxpayers, but residents are out of the loop on how these groups work.
Companies like Amazon and Google are often coming to small towns amid the boom in generative artificial intelligence. That has forced residents to fill an information gap left by the decline of local media.
