OpenAI doubles funding for Lenfest AI newsroom fellowship

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program on Monday. OpenAI is committing a new $5 million, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. The two organizations say this doubles OpenAI's earlier support.

The program started in 2024 with AI engineering fellows at 11 major American news organizations, and Lenfest calls it the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism. Fellows are hired locally, work full time inside a news organization, and build tools and usage policies with editorial, product, and revenue teams. Lenfest will now invite a new group of news organizations to join. It has not said how many will be added or when.

The announcement lists several results from the pilot:

• The Philadelphia Inquirer built Dewey, a tool for searching decades of archived reporting. It also built Scrape, which turned a monitoring task that took about 15 hours a week into a daily digest of possible story leads.
• Chicago Public Media used AI-assisted translation to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage much faster than before. It also transcribed audio archives that had been in storage for decades.
• Other participants worked on advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, and moving from print to digital production.

Fellows shared code and changed one another's tools to fit other newsrooms. Several are expected to stay on as full-time employees.

Lenfest CEO Jim Friedlich said the main lesson was that responsible AI adoption "is less about the technology and more about trust." OpenAI's Tom Rubin, Chief of Intellectual Property and Content, said the company is "excited to expand our partnership."