Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program

A program exploring the use of AI for news business sustainability from The Lenfest Institute in partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft

In October 2024, The Lenfest Institute launched the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program in partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft. The program is designed to help local newsrooms explore ways in which artificial intelligence can help drive business sustainability and innovation.

In the initial round of the program, five newsrooms each received a grant to hire a two-year AI fellow to pursue projects that focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies within their organizations. The fellowship also provides OpenAI and Microsoft Azure credits to help these publications experiment and develop tools to assist with local news.

As part of the program, the news organizations will work collaboratively with each other and the broader news industry to share leanings, product developments, case studies, and technical information needed to help replicate their work in other newsrooms.

Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Members

Chicago Public Media
The Minnesota Star Tribune
Newsday (Long Island)
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Seattle Times

Lessons from the fellows

Navigating the AI landscape: How news organizations are creating trust-based AI policies

No matter if your newsroom has an established AI policy or if you are just getting started, our grantees shared 5 key challenges to consider and 5 practical recommendations for establishing a trust-based, ethical AI policy.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has been publishing for more than 190 years. Here’s how it built an AI-driven research tool to unlock its archives.

Through its participation in the Microsoft AI Development Acceleration Program Hackathon, The Inquirer created AI-powered research assistant that can quickly navigate its archives and summarize the findings. The tool was designed to understand journalists’ natural language queries, retrieve highly relevant information from across the archives, and synthesize the results into coherent, insightful responses.

Local News Solutions

The Lenfest Institute provides free tools and resources for local journalism leaders to develop sustainable strategies to serve their communities.

Find Your News Solution

Explore our work

Donate