Lenfest Institute expands AI journalism program with $5M more from OpenAI

The Lenfest Institute grows landmark program with expanded OpenAI support

The Lenfest Institute is expanding its AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program with an additional $5 million from OpenAI, plus up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. Launched in 2024, the program embeds full-time AI engineers in 11 local US newsrooms to build practical tools. Examples: The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dewey tool searches decades of archives, and Scrape turns a 15-hour weekly monitoring task into a daily digest. Chicago Public Media uses AI translation for faster Spanish coverage. Key lesson: success depends on trust, not just tech. A new cohort of news organizations will be invited. The post doesn't name which ones.