OpenAI has committed $5 million to expand an AI fellowship program for local news organizations run by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. The announcement was made jointly on Monday, September 28, 2026.
The company will also provide up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI said the new commitment doubles its previous support of the program.
The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program launched in 2024. It placed full-time AI engineers inside 11 major American news organizations. The Lenfest Institute describes it as the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.
How the Fellowship Works
Fellows are hired locally and work alongside reporters, editors, product teams, revenue staff, and executives. They look for problems specific to each organization and build AI tools to address them.
They also help write policies on the safe, transparent, and ethical use of AI. Several fellows are expected to stay on as full-time employees at their organizations.
At The Philadelphia Inquirer, fellows helped build a tool called Dewey. It lets journalists search decades of archived reporting.
The Inquirer also developed Scrape, a monitoring tool. It turned a task that took about 15 hours per week into a daily digest of possible story leads.
At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation helped the organization publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage much faster. It also transcribed audio archives of Chicago news and culture that had been in storage for decades.
Other projects covered advertising prospecting, donor modeling, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, and audience personalization.
Lessons From the First Two Years
The institute said trust mattered more than the technology itself. Fellows built adoption by listening to staff and learning how they worked.
The strongest projects started with a clear problem rather than a planned technical solution. Teams tested ideas on a small scale and checked whether the tools improved the work.
Fellows also shared code and ideas across newsrooms. The Baltimore Banner, for example, used work from the Inquirer's team to build its own news discovery tools.
"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, executive director and CEO of The Lenfest Institute.
Tom Rubin, OpenAI's chief of intellectual property and content, said the partnership has produced "so many practical examples of journalists using AI as a tool to help deliver quality local news."
The next phase will continue placing AI fellows inside news organizations. The Lenfest Institute will invite a new group of news organizations to join the program.
The institute also plans to turn the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, plugins, guides, and playbooks. It said these resources are intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations.
