The Lenfest Institute expands landmark AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program with new OpenAI support

Following a successful two-year pilot funded by OpenAI and Microsoft, the next phase will scale embedded AI innovation from individual newsrooms to the broader local news ecosystem.

September 28, 2026

PHILADELPHIA — The Lenfest Institute for Journalism today announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, building on what has become the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.

Since its launch in 2024 with AI engineering fellows in 11 major American news organizations, the program has demonstrated that embedded AI engineers can help local news organizations accelerate innovation, strengthen business sustainability, and responsibly adopt emerging technology. The program will expand with a new $5 million commitment from OpenAI, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI has doubled its previous support of the program.

The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program places full-time AI technologists into operating news organizations to drive business innovation in local journalism. Over the past two years, the program has evolved from an ambitious pilot into a proven model for helping local news organizations develop guardrails and strategies for adopting AI to support their transformation.

As the AI Collaborative and Fellowship enters its next stage, The Lenfest Institute will invite a new group of news organizations to join the cohort to further responsible AI experimentation and implementation.

AI engineering fellows work alongside newsroom leaders, reporters, product teams, revenue staff, and executives to identify organization-specific challenges and build practical AI engineering solutions, along with safe, transparent, and ethical policies. Their work is designed to strengthen news organizations while preserving the human judgment, editorial integrity, expertise, and trust at the heart of local journalism — in fact, several engineering fellows are expected to stay on as full-time employees at multiple organizations, speaking to the value of their deployment.

Across the 11 participating organizations, fellows have demonstrated how AI can support a wide range of functions, from audience engagement and news product development to investigative news research, advertising and reader revenue operations, and expanded staff reporting impact and community reach.

The pilot also revealed that successful AI adoption depends as much on trust, collaboration, and a clear understanding of organizational needs as it does on the technology itself. Embedded fellows were hired locally and became part of the organizations they served, learning how journalists work and building solutions rooted in the real needs of newsroom and business teams.

“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. The fellows have helped their news organizations build practical tools and drive culture change from the inside — through clear guardrails, policy standards, and open communication,” said Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich. “The next phase of the Collaborative and Fellowship Program is an opportunity for more news enterprises to intentionally experiment with AI under the highest editorial standards and with human news judgment at the forefront.”

“Over the first two years of this partnership, it’s been wonderful to see so many practical examples of journalists using AI as a tool to help deliver quality local news,” said Tom Rubin, OpenAI Chief of Intellectual Property and Content. “Local news plays a vital role in building the human connections that make a neighborhood, town, or city truly feel like a community. We’re excited to expand our partnership with The Lenfest Institute to support even more journalists in this important work.”

Proof in practice

When the fellowship launched, generative AI was still largely untested inside local news organizations. Over the past two years, participating organizations have developed practical applications that demonstrate how AI can support the full breadth of the news enterprise.

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, the fellowship supported the development of Dewey, a tool that helps journalists search decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, a monitoring tool that transformed a roughly 15-hour-per-week reporting task into a daily digest of potential story leads from around the newspaper’s region.

At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows enabled the organization to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage in a fraction of the time previously required, and to transcribe audio archives reflecting Chicago news and culture that had been in storage for decades. Across other participating organizations, projects have addressed advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, print-to-digital production transition, and operational efficiency.

Collectively, these projects demonstrated that AI’s potential extends far beyond improvements in journalist impact and productivity. It can strengthen nearly every function of a modern news organization while preserving and empowering journalists’ central role in producing trusted, independent reporting.

The AI Collaborative’s projects also began to travel from newsroom to newsroom. Fellows shared code, adapted one another’s ideas, compared implementation strategies, and built on work developed at peer organizations. Tools and approaches originating in one newsroom became starting points for solving related problems elsewhere, demonstrating how innovation developed through the fellowship can extend well beyond a single organization.

What we learned

Over the course of the pilot, several important lessons emerged:

Trust matters more than technology.
Embedding locally hired engineers inside organizations for two years proved transformational. Rather than serving as outside consultants with a mission to force AI adoption, fellows worked to develop a deep understanding of editorial workflows, organizational culture, and user needs across each respective news business. Fellows often identified valuable opportunities through listening, spending time with staff, understanding how they worked, identifying recurring pain points, and building solutions alongside the people who would ultimately use them. As trust grew, so did adoption, with journalists increasingly seeing fellows as team members they could collaborate with to solve meaningful problems — bringing their own ideas and challenges to fellows and incorporating the resulting tools into their daily work.

Start with the problem, not with AI.
Across the cohort, fellows found that the strongest projects began with a clearly defined challenge rather than a predetermined technical solution. Successful projects were built through close collaboration with users, small-scale experimentation, ongoing evaluation, and a focus on whether the technology meaningfully improved the work.

Collaboration accelerates innovation.
One newsroom’s breakthrough frequently became another newsroom’s starting point. The Baltimore Banner, for example, drew on work developed by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s team while building the Banner’s own news discovery tools. Fellows across the cohort have similarly exchanged code, product ideas, technical approaches, and lessons learned, allowing organizations to advance faster together than they could independently.

What’s next

The next phase of the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program builds on the fellowship’s foundation while significantly expanding its market reach. The program will continue to embed AI fellows within participating news organizations, maintaining its commitment to helping those organizations transform to meet the needs of modern users. The Lenfest Institute will also broaden the fellowship to include a wider range of news organizations.

At the same time, The Lenfest Institute will expand its technical capabilities to help proactively turn the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, playbooks, and technical resources intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations. One goal of providing implementation support is to make the cross-newsroom learning that emerged organically during the pilot easier to sustain and scale, so that a tool, workflow, or technical breakthrough developed inside one organization can become shared infrastructure for the broader news field.

Together, these efforts represent an evolution from successful experimentation toward scalable impact, creating practical AI solutions that can strengthen local journalism well beyond the fellowship itself.

A model for the future of local journalism

By combining embedded AI engineering expertise with shared tools, technical infrastructure, and cross-organizational learning, The Lenfest Institute seeks to ensure that innovations developed inside a handful of newsrooms can ultimately benefit hundreds more.

The renewed and growing partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared belief that local journalism can 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 is focused on helping more news organizations use emerging technology to strengthen their journalism, build sustainable businesses, and better serve their communities.

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About The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism and community in Philadelphia and nationwide. 