OpenAI expands initiatives to support journalism from classrooms to newsrooms

OpenAI is launching a major, multi-faceted initiative to support the journalism ecosystem with tools, training, partnerships, shared learning, and practical enablement for students, educators, journalists, and news organizations.

It begins with the next generation of reporters at CUNY’S Newmark J-School and Northwestern University’s Medill School.

For the new 2026–2027 academic year, OpenAI is collaborating closely with the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Newmark J-School and the Medill's Knight Lab, two of the leaders in journalism and technology in the country, and providing more than 400 ChatGPT Edu 1 subscriptions to interested graduate students and faculty at those schools.

Through our renewed partnership with the American Journalism Project , all 50+ of the news organizations in their portfolio will have the opportunity to access ChatGPT enterprise and API credits. AJP’s Product & AI Studio will turn the strongest use cases into reusable tools and infrastructure, and share playbooks and lessons across the portfolio and with the broader nonprofit and local news community.

At these conferences, OpenAI has listened to journalists’ needs, shared hands-on examples, and helped reporters explore practical ways to use AI in their daily work. That engagement has also informed the continued expansion of OpenAI Academy for News Organizations ⁠ (opens in a new window) , a learning hub with practical training, newsroom-relevant use cases, playbooks, and real-world examples for journalists and publishers using AI.

“The media industry is rapidly evolving, and AI is a major driver of this change. The Knight Lab is committed to ensuring that any Medill graduate students who want to use the latest AI tools and techniques can do so without cost being a barrier. Offering equity of access is crucial when incorporating new technologies. The Knight Lab has been working at the intersection of media and AI for more than a decade. This support from OpenAI helps us to continue to explore the future of media and technology, allowing faculty to teach and practice journalism in countless new ways.”

The Tow-Knight Center at the Newmark J-School and the Knight Labs at Medill are the first partners in this latest phase of OpenAI’s commitment to journalism, and additional efforts are already underway to expand support across the journalism education ecosystem.

AI can help journalism students work more ambitiously. It can support deeper investigations, faster analysis, stronger brainstorming, new storytelling formats, and more pointed questioning.

Journalism students entering classrooms this year are preparing to enter one of the most dynamic and difficult moments in the history of the news industry. AI is helping reporters, editors, and business teams analyze public records faster, translate stories for broader audiences, uncover patterns in large datasets, search archives, improve reader experiences, assist in marketing, build new products, and spend more time on the work that matters most: reporting, verification, storytelling, strengthening business, and serving communities.

For journalism schools, this creates an important opportunity. Students should graduate not only understanding how AI is changing the profession, but also knowing how to use it thoughtfully, creatively, ethically and responsibly to make their journalism, as well as the business of journalism, stronger. Through these collaborations, OpenAI and the Newmark and Medill communities will seek to further this outcome.

“Generative AI is a transformative technology that will remake the information landscape, and one that the journalism industry will need to adapt to and shape in order to fulfill our mission of informing the public. We intend for the Newmark community to be at the forefront of this transformation, and it’s critical that they learn about and be immersed in this technology. We’re very grateful to OpenAI for making the tools available to our students and faculty so they can better prepare themselves for this future.”