Lenfest Institute expands AI fellowship program with OpenAI support

9/30/2026

AI Collaborative expands with $5M from OpenAI for local newsrooms New fellows will build practical tools and share what works across journalism

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism has announced a new phase of its AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, backed by an additional $5 million commitment from OpenAI plus up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. Launched in 2024, the program places fulltime AI technologists inside local news organizations to help teams build practical tools, improve workflows, and adopt AI responsibly. According to the organizations involved, the effort has become the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism. The first two years of the initiative included 11 major U.S. news organizations, where fellows worked on projects such as archival search tools, reporting leads monitoring, translation workflows, audience personalization, and revenue operations. Lenfest says the next stage will bring in more newsrooms and turn the strongest projects into reusable resources for the wider journalism field.