The Lenfest Institute for Journalism announced an expansion of its AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, supported by a new $5 million commitment from OpenAI along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support, doubling OpenAI‘s previous backing. The program launched in 2024 with AI engineering fellows embedded in 11 major American news organizations and has since grown into what the institute describes as the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.

The program places full-time AI technologists inside operating newsrooms to drive business innovation and responsible AI adoption. Fellows work alongside reporters, product teams, revenue staff, and executives to identify organization-specific challenges and build practical solutions, while also developing safe, transparent, and ethical AI policies. The institute reports that several fellows are expected to remain as full-time employees at their host organizations, indicating the value of the deployment. Across the 11 participants, projects have supported audience engagement, news product development, investigative research, advertising, reader revenue, and staff reporting impact.

Concrete examples are cited as proof of the model. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, fellows helped build Dewey, a tool for searching decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, a monitoring tool that turned a roughly 15-hour-per-week reporting task into a daily digest of potential story leads. At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows allowed time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage to be published in a fraction of the previous time, and also enabled transcription of decades-old audio archives. Other organizations used AI for advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, and print-to-digital production transitions.

The article also shares lessons learned from the pilot. First, trust matters more than technology: locally hired engineers embedded for two years became part of the organization, listening to staff and building tools alongside users, which increased adoption. Second, the strongest projects start with a defined problem rather than a predetermined AI solution, using close collaboration, small experiments, and ongoing evaluation. Third, collaboration accelerates innovation: fellows shared code and ideas across newsrooms, with The Baltimore Banner drawing on Philadelphia Inquirer work for its own news discovery tools.

The next phase will invite a new group of news organizations into the cohort and broaden the range of participants. The Lenfest Institute also plans to expand technical capabilities to turn the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, and playbooks that can benefit hundreds of news organizations, not just those directly in the fellowship. This shift from experimentation to scalable impact is the program’s stated goal. The partnership with OpenAI reflects a belief that local journalism benefits most from AI when newsrooms have the expertise, infrastructure, and collaborative networks to apply it safely.