MOUNT VERNON — At its core, journalism provides news and information to citizens.
Each day, our Knox Pages and Source Media teams work hard to answer your questions and provide up-to-date news on a variety of topics, including government, entertainment and business.
Two years ago, a new topic hit Knox County, and it hit hard: Intel.
Intel’s announcement that it was bringing a semiconductor chip factory to Licking County resonated with Knox County. With Intel’s northern boundary only 11 miles from Centerburg, Knox County residents have lots of questions.
We have questions, too.
How will Intel affect Knox County? What can we do to prepare? Looking to the future, will Intel change our way of life?
But those are the broad, generalized questions. On a grassroots level, local residents want to know:
- Will Intel increase our standard of living (including more restaurant options) or merely bring more traffic headaches?
- Are the housing developments underway enough to accommodate Intel’s workforce?
- Can Knox County retain its rural character and agricultural heritage despite Intel being on its doorstep?
Intel’s arrival generated countless other questions. We want to find at least some of the answers.
So we’re hitting the road to Sherwood, Oregon. Sherwood is home to an Intel plant and once that faced many of the same questions. We want to learn first-hand how it fared.
Think of it as answering a lot of Open Source questions at one time.
Why this project matters
Why are we doing this project? Because Intel will impact everyone. It’s not just officials and leaders who need to know what’s coming. Everyday residents will feel the effects, too; even children attending school. As a community, we deserve to know more. We need to know more.
That’s why we are embarking on this project.
Examining the Intel story in a thoughtful manner is going to require an immense amount of work.
It will involve hours spent asking the right questions to dozens of people both in Oregon and here locally. More hours will be spent combing through documents and records to find measurable data, and even more hours analyzing, interpreting and summarizing data for you, the reader.
To do proper justice to this kind of reporting, our experienced and award-winning team will commit hundreds of hours to this work. We are traveling to Oregon for the same reason we travel to school board and village council meetings — we want to tell a full story, and sometimes there’s no substitute for being there.
Sure, we want to talk to the local officials. But we also want to talk to teachers, business owners and workers. We want to go to the local shops and restaurants and start up conversations with residents about how their community has changed over the last 50 years. This kind of in-depth, impactful reporting cannot be done without boots on the ground.
So why do we want to do this again? Because we believe Intel is a generational story – and Knox County needs to be ready.
We need your help
A project of this magnitude is not just time intensive, but costly. And this is where we are inviting you, our dedicated reader, to join us through a tax-deductible donation.
Whether $5 or $500, your donation will go towards:
- Helping with travel costs
- Hiring experts to help decipher data in a simple way
- Freelance writers to cover local beats
- Advertising to get this information to as many people as we can
- Possible community gatherings or events to report our findings
- Helping ensure we can keep doing this important work for our readers and our region
We recognize some of you may have additional questions before you consider donating. We respect that and invite you to check out our FAQ below. If you still have questions, we encourage you to reach out to us directly at news@knoxpages.com. We’d love to connect with you.
We all care deeply about Knox County, and we’re excited to work with you to discover what might lie ahead in the world of Intel.
Three ways to get involved:
DONATE
Whether $5 or $500, all donations are instrumental to bringing this project to life. “Beyond the Chip” is reporting for you.
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to the “Beyond the Chip” newsletter so you don’t miss out on any updates throughout the project.
SPONSOR
We offer options ranging from $1,000 to $25,000 for organizations that are invested in seeing this reporting come to life.
FAQ
Why are you asking for donations when you’re requiring people to become members for full access to your stories?
We have always sought additional funding for labor and time intensive reporting projects like this. Traditionally we do that through business sponsorships, which we will also do here. A current example is our project at Richland Source on the state of the workforce.
But because this project will touch on every aspect of our community, we wanted to give an opportunity for our readers to be a part of it if they want.
Will this series be free to read or will I have to have a membership?
Our goal is to fully fund this reporting through individual donations and business sponsorships, which will allow us to offer all content from this series free to read for everyone.
If you’re not a non-profit, how is my donation tax-deductible?
All donations will run through our partner organization, Report for America. We are proud to be a host newsroom through Report for America for the last three years. Our current RFA corp members are Knox Pages reporter Grant Ritchey and Ashland Source reporter Mariah Thomas. Their work is possible because of generous contributions from RFA to fund their reporting. Our readers have the ability to keep their work going, both everyday reporting and special reporting projects like Beyond the Chip, through tax-deductible donations.
How can an organization support this project?
We offer several sponsorship levels for organizations. For more information on sponsorship, click here.
Why are you traveling to Oregon? Can’t this be done through virtual meetings and phone calls?
It’s the same reason we attend school board meetings and village council meetings — to tell the full story. We don’t want to just talk to government officials, which we could probably do via a call. We want to have real, face-to-face conversations with residents. We want to have genuine interactions to truly get a sense of the lived experience impact Intel has had on their rural community. And we believe that is best done through boots on the ground journalism. You can be confident though that there will still likely be many follow up virtual meetings and phone calls.
How will this reporting impact the lives of citizens in Knox County?
In the immediate, it won’t have a direct impact. But it’s our hope that by moving past the “what ifs” to look at real-life lived “what happened” to a similar community our officials, leaders, businesses, educators, developers and others can start to make proactive decisions. Decisions around roads and traffic flow, housing and development, education among other areas will all directly impact Knox County residents. Don’t you want the people thinking about these areas of your life to have as much information as possible so Knox County is not caught off guard?
