The Lenfest Institute for Journalism announced the next phase of its AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, expanding its partnership with OpenAI with a new $5 million commitment, doubling its prior support. The program, which has grown into the largest AI fellowship in American journalism, will also include up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support.
Since its launch in 2024, the program has demonstrated that embedded AI engineers can help local news organizations accelerate innovation, strengthen business sustainability, and responsibly adopt emerging technology.
Over the past two years, the program has evolved from an ambitious pilot into a proven model for helping local news organizations develop guardrails and strategies for adopting AI to support their transformation.
"The most valuable lesson of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship’s first two years is that responsible AI adoption is less about the technology and more about trust," said Jim Friedlich, Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO. "The next phase of the Collaborative and Fellowship Program is an opportunity for more news enterprises to intentionally experiment with AI under the highest editorial standards and with human news judgment at the forefront."
"Over the first two years of this partnership, it’s been wonderful to see so many practical examples of journalists using AI as a tool to help deliver quality local news," said Tom Rubin, OpenAI Chief of Intellectual Property and Content.
"Local news plays a vital role in building the human connections that make a neighborhood, town, or city truly feel like a community."
The expansion follows the program’s successful pilot phase, during which participating organizations developed practical applications demonstrating how AI can support the full breadth of the news enterprise. These projects have addressed advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, print-to-digital production transition, and operational efficiency.
The AI Collaborative’s projects also began to travel from newsroom to newsroom. Fellows shared code, adapted one another’s ideas, compared implementation strategies, and built on work developed at peer organizations. Tools and approaches originating in one newsroom became starting points for solving related problems elsewhere, demonstrating how innovation developed through the fellowship can extend well beyond a single organization.
Source: openai
