The Lenfest Institute grows landmark program with expanded OpenAI support

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI jointly announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, which has become the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism. Launched in 2024 with AI engineering fellows placed in 11 major American news organizations, the program embeds full-time AI technologists into newsrooms to drive business innovation, strengthen sustainability, and ensure responsible adoption of emerging technology. OpenAI has doubled its previous support with a new $5 million commitment, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support.

Key outcomes from the first two years include practical tools such as Dewey (an archive search tool) and Scrape (a monitoring tool) at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and AI-assisted translation workflows at Chicago Public Media. Major lessons learned include: trust matters more than technology, projects should start with clearly defined problems rather than predetermined AI solutions, and cross-newsroom collaboration accelerates innovation. The next phase will broaden participation to more news organizations and scale successful projects into reusable tools, frameworks, and playbooks intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations, evolving from successful experimentation toward scalable impact.

(Source：OpenAI)