Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI announced the new phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program on Monday, September 28, 2026. For the program, which began with AI engineers at 11 major American news organizations in 2024, OpenAI will newly commit $5 million, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI will thus double its previous support.
The program supports job innovation, sustainability and the responsible use of technology in local journalism by placing full-time AI specialists at news organizations. Lenfest Institute plans to bring a new group of news organizations into the program and reach a broader range of organizations. Engineers work with newsrooms, reporters, product, revenue and management teams to develop solutions to organization-specific challenges and create safe, transparent policies. The aim is to preserve human judgment, editorial integrity, expertise and trust. Some engineers are expected to continue working full-time at more than one organization.
The work developed at the 11 organizations covered areas such as audience engagement, news product development, investigative journalism, advertising and reader revenue, subscription growth, donor modeling, personalization, tracking public meetings and the transition from print content to digital. Dewey, developed at The Philadelphia Inquirer, enabled journalists to search archived news stories. Scrape turned a task that took approximately 15 hours a week into a daily digest containing potential story leads in the region. At Chicago Public Media, AI-powered translation enabled Spanish-language news stories to be published in less time; it also helped transcribe audio archives stored for decades.
The main lessons from the program’s two-year implementation are as follows:
- Trust is more important than technology: The integration of locally hired engineers into the organizations enabled journalists to see them as team members rather than outside consultants.
- Start with the problem, not AI: The most successful projects began with a clear organizational need instead of a predetermined technology.
- Collaboration accelerates innovation: Organizations built on one another’s work by sharing code, product ideas and implementation experience. The Baltimore Banner drew on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s work while developing news discovery tools.
In the new phase, Lenfest Institute aims to turn successful projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins and implementation guides, enabling them to reach hundreds of news organizations.
Why it matters
This expansion broadens the scope of a model designed to move AI beyond isolated experiments in newsrooms and address it alongside product, revenue and editorial workflows. Having engineers join news organizations’ teams directly ensures that technological solutions are developed in line with the institutions’ actual needs and the ways journalists work. Sharing the resulting tools, guides and frameworks with other organizations could extend the experience of the program’s initial participants across a broader local journalism network. At the same time, the rollout phase highlights the need to adapt them to the needs of different organizations, maintain safe-use policies, and preserve human judgment and editorial integrity. The open question is whether these shared resources can be implemented with the same level of functionality and reliability across the expanding group of organizations.
Background
OpenAI is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: over the past 90 days, we have published 58 news reports mentioning the name; the most recent is dated 28 September 2026.