An exclusive about an Intel factory

The scoop that wasn't

Hi readers, It’s Friday afternoon, I’m tired, you’re tired, so I’ll keep this relatively short. I had a story that went live last night at 10 pm Eastern that was a scoop of sorts. Intel shared with me that it was planning on building a $20 billion semiconductor plant on the outskirts of Ohio, “the largest semiconductor manufacturing location on the planet,” CEO Pat Gelsinger told me, last Sunday, where I was huddled in a cabin in Bodega Bay trying not to wake the baby. (Hurrah for high-speed Internet). The investment is an effort to address a global chip shortage and try to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S., and honestly, probably a political play to get more support from the Ohio Congressional delegation for the $52 billion CHIPS for America Act, which is stalled in Congress. 

Here’s the story:

Exclusive: Intel Reveals Plans for Massive New Ohio Factory, Fighting the Chip Shortage Stateside

You can read the story to find out more about why we don’t have as much chip manufacturing as Asia does and what this means for manufacturing in Ohio, but I’ll talk a little bit here about the journalistic process, because it was a doozy.

Because of a professional connection between a TIME editor and Intel, the company agreed, weeks ago, to give us the exclusive on this announcement. They’d brief us and we’d write an exclusive story that ran the day they announced it and every other news outlet would have to follow my reporting and be sad. The original plan was to travel to Columbus, but then Omicron happened and Columbus is not that easy to get to, so we nixed the travel plans. 

That meant that in early January I found myself tasked with writing a story about how a company would change a town I had never visited and could not ask anyone specific questions about because I couldn’t reveal to anyone that Intel was building a chip plant there. So I had to find random people who could talk to me vaguely about what they thought about this town, New Albany, and … tech, vaguely? Thankfully there were some very active Facebook commenters in New Albany who I could reach.

I kept my end of the bargain and did not tell a soul, but it turns out that some state officials blabbed (kudos to the local reporters who convinced them). Last Friday, the 14th, the Cleveland Dispatch ran a story saying Intel was planning to build a $2 billion factory in Ohio. Intel did not confirm this, but a state official did, and so there went our big reveal. But since Intel was making a big announcement on the 21st, and since we had agreed to honor the embargo, and in exchange, got interviews with people like the Gov. of Ohio and the CEO of Intel, we couldn’t run our story yet. We were very worried that big national publications would run the story, but Intel promised they wouldn’t confirm any details so I suppose no one wanted to run with it without official confirmation. 

That we lost the scoop was annoying, but what became even more annoying was that the Biden administration, after a week of very bad news, decided that they would announce this news this Friday in a big press conference. And they wanted to brief White House reporters on Thursday night. Which meant that any scoop we had would be totally gone, and the story would run alongside dozens of other stories like it. After some negotiation,  Intel agreed to let us run the story Thursday night at 10 p.m., but not a moment later, and the email briefing the White House reporters went out at 9:55 p.m., but they couldn’t write about it until 5 am the next morning. To be fair, I got a lot of great access, time with Intel’s CEO and the Gov. of Ohio and the president of Ohio State (who is so cool! A woman! Who has a Stanford PhdD in electrical engineering and came from SUNY! And is trying to make STEM more open to women and minorities!), and I got a big jump on the story, but since it didn’t run til 10 pm, it wasn’t that much of a scoop. 

Now you know the tale of Alana’s scoop that wasn’t. The story was still interesting to report because it turns out that Intel is in a fairly bad place right now, having lost its way in chipmaking, and this is a big bet to turn the company around. Hope you click, and then think about all the chips involved in the process of you reading this Substack and then reading my article and then wandering over to Wordle, which is probably, to be honest, why you opened up the Internet anyway.