In a joint announcement dated September 28, 2026, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI revealed the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, marking a substantial expansion of the initiative.
Launched in 2024, the program has become the largest AI fellowship in U.S. journalism, initially embedding AI engineering fellows at 11 major American news organizations. The pilot demonstrated that embedded AI engineers can accelerate innovation, strengthen business sustainability, and support responsible adoption of emerging technology within local newsrooms.
New financial and technical support
OpenAI committed $5 million in new funding to the program and pledged up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. This effectively doubles OpenAI’s prior support for the fellowship and complements the company’s broader work supporting journalism.
The model: embedded AI technologists in operating newsrooms
The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program places full-time AI technologists inside operating news organizations to drive business and editorial innovation. Over the past two years the fellowship evolved from an ambitious pilot to a proven approach: fellows worked alongside newsroom leaders, reporters, product teams, revenue staff, and executives to identify organization-specific challenges and build practical AI engineering solutions together with safe, transparent, and ethical policies.
Several fellows are expected to remain as full-time employees at the organizations where they were placed, indicating the practical value of embedding engineers.
Concrete examples and outcomes
- At The Philadelphia Inquirer, the fellowship supported development of Dewey, a tool for searching decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, a monitoring tool that converted a task that previously took about 15 hours per week into a daily digest of potential story leads from across the paper’s region.
- At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows allowed the organization to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage in a fraction of the time previously required, and to transcribe decades-old audio archives.
- Other projects across participating organizations addressed advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, print-to-digital production transitions, and operational efficiency.
Taken together, these projects show that AI’s potential extends far beyond improving individual journalists’ productivity: it can bolster nearly every function of a modern news organization while preserving journalists’ central role in producing trusted, independent reporting.
Lessons from the pilot
Key lessons identified during the pilot include:
- Trust matters more than technology: embedding locally hired engineers for two years proved transformational. Rather than acting as outside consultants pushing AI adoption, fellows became team members who learned editorial workflows and organizational culture, identified recurring pain points through listening, and built solutions alongside the people who would use them. As trust grew, adoption followed.
- Start with the problem, not with AI: the most successful projects began with a clearly defined challenge and were developed through close collaboration with users, small-scale experimentation, and ongoing evaluation.
- Collaboration accelerates innovation: breakthroughs in one newsroom frequently became starting points in others. Fellows shared code, product ideas, technical approaches, and lessons learned, allowing organizations to advance faster collectively.
Next steps: scaling and turning projects into shared resources
The program’s next phase will continue to embed AI fellows within participating news organizations while expanding the cohort to invite new newsrooms into responsible AI experimentation and implementation. The Lenfest Institute will also scale up its technical capabilities to convert the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, playbooks, and other technical resources intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations.
One aim of providing this implementation support is to make the cross-newsroom learning that emerged organically during the pilot easier to sustain and scale, so that an effective tool or workflow developed in one newsroom can become shared infrastructure for the broader field.
By combining embedded AI engineering expertise with shared tools, technical infrastructure, and cross-organizational learning, the Lenfest Institute intends to ensure that innovations developed in a handful of newsrooms can ultimately benefit many more.
Why this matters
The renewed and expanded partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared belief that local journalism will benefit most from AI when news organizations have the expertise, infrastructure, and collaborative networks to apply it safely. By scaling what has worked across the fellowship, the Lenfest Institute aims to help more news organizations use emerging technology to strengthen journalism, build sustainable businesses, and better serve their communities.
The announcement was issued jointly by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI on September 28, 2026.
