Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• The youths. Signal Ohio’s Andrew Tobias and Jake Zuckerman report, “Just 23% of Ohio’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote – among the lowest rates in the U.S.”

Just 23% of Ohio’s 18-year-olds are registered to vote, a number that ranks among the lowest in the country, according to updated numbers compiled by a nonpartisan advocacy organization.

The Civics Center tracks registration rates for the country’s youngest eligible voters in 31 U.S. states, a number limited by their ability to acquire commercially available voter data. Ohio’s registration rate is the 28th-lowest. The 23% registration rate is significantly lower than comparable states like North Carolina (58%), Iowa (47%) and Florida (46%). Among neighbors, it’s lower than Michigan (79%), Indiana (31%), Kentucky (28%) but higher than Pennsylvania (22%).

• The Athens NEWS. Ideastream’s Conor Morris writes, “My first newspaper is gone. Its lessons still shape the stories I tell.”

The Athens NEWS, the local newspaper in Southeast Ohio where I got my start as a journalist, is no longer. It halted printing in January 2025, and its website is gone.

The NEWS has gone the way of many good newspapers in recent years. The U.S. lost at least 3,500 of them in the last two decades, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Also gone are three-quarters of the jobs. That’s bad news for not just the journalists, but entire swathes of the country.

• Data centers and gas. Cleveland.com’s Anna Staver reports, “Ohio’s AI data center boom is fueling a natural gas power rush.”

Across Ohio, energy companies are racing to build gas-fired power plants that will never send a single watt of electricity to your home.

That’s because these plants—ten of them, proposed or already under construction—are being built for one customer: data centers running artificial intelligence.

• Iran v. Vietnam. In a Foreign Policy opinion column, Paul Musgrave writes, “Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam: A war of choice has turned into a strategic disaster for Washington.”

At his second inaugural, U.S. President Donald Trump pronounced his hope “that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” By losing his Gulf war, Trump has achieved that goal. His choice to launch a campaign against Iran was encouraged by others, but fully his own. It has led to a reversal that marks a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.