OpenAI and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism announced on 28 September that OpenAI will provide $5 million in funding plus up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support for the Lenfest AI fellowship, doubling its earlier commitment. The programme embeds AI engineers inside local newsrooms and now runs across 11 US news organisations, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Public Media and The Baltimore Banner.
The pilot, which ran from 2024, produced working tools rather than demos. One, called Scrape, turned a monitoring job that took 15 hours a week into a daily digest; another, Dewey, searches newsroom archives. Other projects covered audience engagement, advertising and donor modelling.
Lenfest’s chief executive Jim Friedlich said “responsible AI adoption is less about the technology and more about trust”.
Why it matters: AI companies’ relationships with publishers are mostly fought over licensing and scraping. Funding engineers inside newsrooms is a different approach, and its results in under-resourced local news will be worth watching. The money also comes from a company with a direct interest in how newsrooms use AI.
Source: OpenAI’s announcement.
