The Lenfest Institute grows landmark program with expanded OpenAI support

The following was issued as a joint announcement on Monday, September 28, 2026, from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI.

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism today announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, building on what has become the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.

Since its launch in 2024 with AI engineering fellows in 11 major American news organizations, the program has demonstrated that embedded AI engineers can help local news organizations accelerate innovation, strengthen business sustainability, and responsibly adopt emerging technology. The program will expand with a new $5 million commitment from OpenAI, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI has doubled its previous support of the program.

At the same time, The Lenfest Institute will expand its technical capabilities to help proactively turn the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, playbooks, and technical resources intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations. One goal of providing implementation support is to make the cross-newsroom learning that emerged organically during the pilot easier to sustain and scale, so that a tool, workflow, or technical breakthrough developed inside one organization can become shared infrastructure for the broader news field.

The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program places full-time AI technologists into operating news organizations to drive business innovation in local journalism. Over the past two years, the program has evolved from an ambitious pilot into a proven model for helping local news organizations develop guardrails and strategies for adopting AI to support their transformation.

Across the 11 participating organizations, fellows have demonstrated how AI can support a wide range of functions, from audience engagement and news product development to investigative news research, advertising and reader revenue operations, and expanded staff reporting impact and community reach.

“Over the first two years of this partnership, it’s been wonderful to see so many practical examples of journalists using AI as a tool to help deliver quality local news,” said Tom Rubin, OpenAI Chief of Intellectual Property and Content. “Local news plays a vital role in building the human connections that make a neighborhood, town, or city truly feel like a community. We’re excited to expand our partnership with The Lenfest Institute to support even more journalists in this important work.”

As the AI Collaborative and Fellowship enters its next stage, The Lenfest Institute will invite a new group of news organizations to join the cohort to further responsible AI experimentation and implementation.

AI engineering fellows work alongside newsroom leaders, reporters, product teams, revenue staff, and executives to identify organization-specific challenges and build practical AI engineering solutions, along with safe, transparent, and ethical policies. Their work is designed to strengthen news organizations while preserving the human judgment, editorial integrity, expertise, and trust at the heart of local journalism — in fact, several engineering fellows are expected to stay on as full-time employees at multiple organizations, speaking to the value of their deployment.

The pilot also revealed that successful AI adoption depends as much on trust, collaboration, and a clear understanding of organizational needs as it does on the technology itself. Embedded fellows were hired locally and became part of the organizations they served, learning how journalists work and building solutions rooted in the real needs of newsroom and business teams.