Reporting Project at Denison University

The Reporting Project began in 2018 at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, under the direction of journalist Jack Shuler and a small faculty-and-student team. The program trains undergraduate reporters on accountability journalism and publishes its work at thereportingproject.org and in partner outlets including the Newark Advocate, Columbus Monthly, and the Ohio Capital Journal. The project’s reporting has covered Licking County land use, opioid response, and local government since its first year.

The data-center coverage began in 2022 when Intel announced its Ohio One fab complex on the New Albany side of the Licking County line. The Reporting Project’s reporters, working with Denison geoscience faculty and with independent hydrologists, documented the scale of Intel’s projected water draw from Hoover Reservoir and the parallel search for supplemental groundwater that the City of New Albany, the Central Ohio Regional Water Authority, and Intel’s consultants pursued through 2023 and 2024. The search covered the Alum Creek watershed and extended north toward Granville, where a Superfund plume under the village’s bedrock has been the subject of federal remediation work since the 1990s.

In 2024 the project published a sustained investigation into covert aquifer drilling in and around Granville. The reporting showed that the hyperscalers’ water consultants were drilling test wells under non-disclosure agreements in locations that overlapped the Superfund plume’s modeled migration path, and that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency had not been informed of the drilling program. Reporters named the consultants, the landowners, and the specific well sites. The coverage prompted formal inquiries from the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, from the Ohio EPA, and from the Licking County Board of Commissioners.

The project’s method is the one investigative journalism programs built into the university tradition: document what is happening, name the people doing it, and keep a public record that organizers and litigators can use. The Reporting Project is not an advocacy organization and does not litigate; it produces the factual record on which the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, Ohio Citizen Action, and the St. Albans Township trustees have built their respective cases.