OpenAI Commits $10 Million to Expand Lenfest Local News AI Fellowship
Updated
Updated · OpenAI · Sep 28
OpenAI Commits $10 Million to Expand Lenfest Local News AI Fellowship
1 articles · Updated · OpenAI · Sep 28
Summary
$5 million in new funding plus up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support will expand the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, which Lenfest says is already the largest AI fellowship in American journalism.
The expansion follows a 2024 pilot that placed AI engineering fellows in 11 U.S. news organizations, where they built tools for archive search, reporting workflows, translation, audience products, revenue operations and other newsroom functions.
Lenfest said the next phase will add a new cohort of news organizations and turn successful projects into reusable tools, frameworks and implementation guides that can spread across more outlets.
The program’s backers say the pilot showed AI adoption worked best when locally embedded engineers built trust, set guardrails and solved specific newsroom problems rather than pushing technology for its own sake.