The news
OpenAI committed $5 million, plus up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support, to expand the Lenfest AI fellowship for local newsrooms, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism said on Monday, September 28, 2026. The institute said OpenAI has doubled its previous support.
The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program launched in October 2024. At the time, OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) each pledged $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits, for a total of up to $10 million. The grants paid for news organizations to hire AI fellows for two years, with projects focused largely on business sustainability.
Eleven organizations took part: The Baltimore Banner, Boston Globe Media, Chicago Public Media, The Dallas Morning News, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday, NEWSWELL at Arizona State University, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ProPublica, The San Francisco Standard and The Seattle Times. Lenfest calls it the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.
For the next phase, Lenfest said it will invite a new group of news organizations to join and expand its technical capacity to turn fellowship projects into reusable tools, plugins, implementation guides and playbooks. The aim is for a tool built inside one newsroom to become shared infrastructure for the wider field. The announcement did not give the size of the new cohort, a timeline, or any role for Microsoft in the expansion.
Lenfest pointed to early results. The Philadelphia Inquirer built Dewey, which helps journalists search decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, which turned a reporting task of roughly 15 hours a week into a daily digest of possible story leads. Chicago Public Media used AI-assisted translation to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage much faster. The announcement did not report revenue or audience figures from the projects.
Jim Friedlich, the institute's executive director and CEO, said the main lesson of the first two years is that responsible AI adoption is “less about the technology and more about trust.” Tom Rubin, OpenAI's chief of intellectual property and content, pointed to practical examples of journalists using AI to deliver local news.
The numbers
- New OpenAI funding commitment
- $5 million
- Additional OpenAI software credits and engineering support
- Up to $5 million
- OpenAI's original 2024 commitment
- $2.5 million funding plus $2.5 million in credits
- Original program total (OpenAI and Microsoft)
- Up to $10 million
- News organizations in the pilot
- 11
- Weekly reporting task automated by the Inquirer's Scrape tool
- About 15 hours
Why CEOs should care
For media executives, the money is useful but the terms matter. Part of the package is up to $5 million in credits and engineering help, which ties newsroom tools to OpenAI's models. Before joining, ask which projects must run on OpenAI, what happens when credits run out, and whether the resulting tools can switch to another model provider. The Lenfest announcement did not mention content licensing or requirements to use OpenAI products, so get any data-use terms, including whether newsroom content sent to the API can be used for model training, in writing.
For CEOs and general counsel at publishers, these grants sit alongside continuing debates over content licensing and fair use, as InsideAI News noted in its coverage. The OpenAI executive quoted in the announcement is its chief of intellectual property and content, a reminder that these partnerships sit close to the company's content interests. Keep grant agreements separate from any licensing negotiations and make sure accepting support does not weaken your position on how your archive is used.
For boards of news organizations, Friedlich's point about trust applies to readers as well. Disclose funding relationships with AI companies clearly, set editorial rules for AI-assisted work, and ask management to report which workflows now depend on a single AI vendor.
The bigger picture
The shift from embedded fellows to shared plugins and playbooks could spread tools built with OpenAI support to many newsrooms that never received a grant. That lowers the cost of AI adoption for small local outlets, which rarely have engineers on staff. It also means the default AI stack for parts of local news may be shaped by one lab's funding.
The first cohort's projects targeted revenue and efficiency as much as journalism, from archive search to advertising prospecting at The Seattle Times. That focus on business sustainability is where AI support is most likely to show measurable returns, and where newsrooms should demand data before scaling.
What’s next
Watch for Lenfest to name the new cohort and publish its first shared tools, and for any statement on whether Microsoft will continue as a funder. Publishers considering applying should also watch whether the released tools work with models other than OpenAI's.
What “Fact-checked” means
Fact-checking means testing a story’s facts against the evidence before it is published. This story went through at least two separate checks before this version was published.
- What we checked
- Its names, figures, dates, job titles, quotes and who said what were checked against the story’s sources, including its main source where it could be opened. The headline was checked for accuracy and overstatement.
- How
- A first check reviewed the whole story. If it passed, a second, skeptical check went back to the sources to look for mistakes in the most important facts. If a check flagged the story, it was edited to fix the problems found, and a separate re-check then reviewed the whole story again.
- Who
- The checks are made by our newsroom, as steps kept separate from the writing, under rules set by our editor, Hussein Mukhtar. A story the checks still flag is held for the editor, who decides whether it is fixed, published or dropped.
- If something is wrong
- “Fact-checked” does not mean error-free. If a material error is found after publication, we correct the story and add a note saying what changed. Report an error
Companies in this story
