OpenAI announced on Monday that it’s doubling its support for the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program. Since the program launched in October 2024, it has placed AI fellows in 11 local newsrooms across the U.S., mainly in metro newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Banner, and The Minnesota Star Tribune.
As the program moves forward, Lenfest plans to keep the same approach of embedding full-time engineering staff in local newsrooms for two years. In this next grant cycle, though, the program is expanding its reach beyond metro newspapers to consider fellowships for local TV news and statewide public service journalism.
“The key success factor seems to be that the fellows are hired locally, report locally, and are viewed as part of their local team, because they are,” Jim Friedlich, executive director and CEO of the Lenfest Institute, told me. “They’re not Lenfest employees, and they’re certainly not Microsoft or OpenAI employees. They’re free to work in any technology that they deem appropriate, and in every case, they were the first full-time AI employee at each news organization.”
The first cohort was funded with $10 million from OpenAI and Microsoft. Each company contributed $2.5 million in cash and $2.5 million in credits that could be used for enterprise licenses, cloud storage, and tokens for generative AI products.
Microsoft began distributing its grant funds six months after OpenAI and hasn’t decided yet whether it will renew its commitment once that cycle ends in 2027. OpenAI, meanwhile, is expanding its support, contributing $10 million to the program on its own: $5 million in cash and $5 million in credits.
“Funding supports people and implementation; credits allow for experimentation and make our technology accessible,” said Tom Rubin, the chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI. “The goal is to create lasting capability for news organizations: deeper research, stronger reporting, richer user experiences, improved workflows, and more sustainable businesses.”
When the fellowship launched in 2024, OpenAI had just closed a funding round that valued it at $157 billion. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that the company is considering a new funding round that could value the company at $1.5 trillion ahead of its IPO.
Alongside that growth, the company is expanding its role as a funder of journalism initiatives and institutions. In July, OpenAI renewed its funding of the Product & AI Studio, a program run through The American Journalism Project (AJP) to help nonprofit local newsrooms experiment with AI. The $5 million in cash and $3 million in credits will support the more than 50 news organizations in AJP’s portfolio. They’re encouraged to build tools and infrastructure that can be used by other newsrooms.
This month, OpenAI also announced it is donating subscriptions for more than 400 enterprise-level ChatGPT accounts to students and faculty at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. In the announcement, OpenAI hinted at further donations to journalism schools down the line.
The Lenfest Institute fellowship is unique in that it brings full-time staffers with technical expertise into news organizations and assigns them newsroom leaders, or “executive sponsors,” to manage their work and ensure they aren’t isolated.
“You get a full-time person to follow the thread and be creative and attack problems as they come in,” said Tristan Loper, the head of national programs at Lenfest. “It’s not a part-time, or consulting, or project-based role. You live and breathe the problem…I think that leads to a lot of organic problem solving and cross-team collaboration.”
As part of the fellowship, participating newsrooms join collaborative Slacks, travel to fellowship summits with training from OpenAI and Microsoft, and receive support to attend journalism conferences. After The Inquirer presented Dewey to the rest of its cohort, a fellow from The Baltimore Banner said they had been working on similar problems with archives in their own newsroom.“Their fellow sat down with Kevin, walked through the code, and made some adjustments to their particular setup,” said Boggie. The Banner has since launched its own version of the tool.
A fellow from Chicago Public Media, which owns WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times, also customized a version of Dewey to interact with radio transcripts. Dewey is open-source, and the underlying code is available on GitHub to newsrooms outside the program as well.
Moving into the second iteration of the fellowship, Lenfest wants to emphasize the collaborative parts of the program further, prioritizing reusable AI tools that can be easily copied and customized for other news organizations.
As part of that push, Lenfest has brought on Sonali Verma, who leads INMA’s Newsroom Innovation Initiative and previously worked on Sophi, an AI-powered paywall product first built in-house at Canada’s Globe and Mail. This week, Lenfest is launching a new newsletter called Context Window, written by Verma, that will share what fellows have learned and link to specific tools and GitHub resources. It’s “all with an eye toward how this can be adopted” by other newsrooms, Loper said.
Chase Davis, a current fellow from The Minnesota Star Tribune and former head of The New York Times’ interactive news team, has also come on board as the program’s technical lead. Among other responsibilities, he’ll help newsrooms productize any AI-powered tools they develop.
Lenfest is encouraging all 11 of the current participating newsrooms to reapply for the next grant cycle, but Friedlich said half, at most, will be reaccepted, leaving room for more news organizations to join.
With this next cohort, Friedlich says he’s interested in exploring how AI can support the business of local TV news. He also sees promise in using AI to support regional public service journalism, such as accountability reporting on state legislatures.
OpenAI’s renewal comes as the U.S. local news industry continues to contract, in part because of traffic declines related to AI search. This month McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized workers across 70 publications. USA Today Co. also made major cuts, referencing AI search–related traffic declines. Against this backdrop, many local newspapers are turning to AI to assist with story drafting, while AI agent–led news publications with little to no human editorial oversight continue to pop up across the country.
Lenfest says it will not invest in newsrooms that plan to use AI primarily to displace human reporting and writing.
“We believe really strongly that there should be a human in the lead, not just a human in the loop — [someone who] is leading the use of AI and its personalization and its adaptations, rather than double-checking the work when it’s about to go out,” said Friedlich. “That may sound old-fashioned, but we think it’s really important.”
