Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter . When he was a “punk-ass skater kid,” Diego Mendoza-Moyers would circle the drainage ditches of El Paso, “a Wild West town upon which a modern city has been built,” as he’d later describe it. He loved the yellow poppies blooming on the side of the mountains, and a song by an El Pasoan who goes by Mr. Crazy Chuco Town: “I love my city, it’s that EPT.” Today, at age thirty, he works as an energy and environment reporter for El Paso Matters . He characterizes the journalism landscape in his area as not “the most robust” compared with, say, a coastal city where reporters compete to be the first to break a piece of news. Here, “if I’m not telling a story,” he told me, “no one else is sometimes.”  That is pretty much what happened in 2023. No one, including Mendoza-Moyers, caught wind of a story that would later become major news: a deal that the City of El Paso made with Meta, which was operating under a holding company called Wurldwide LLC.…