Lenfest expands AI fellowships with $5 million from OpenAI

The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program began in 2024, when generative AI was still largely untested inside local news organizations. It placed full-time AI engineers into 11 major American news organizations. According to the joint announcement, those fellows worked 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.

The body reports that the pilot produced concrete applications. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, the fellowship supported Dewey, a tool that helps journalists search decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, which transformed a roughly 15-hour-per-week reporting task into a daily digest of potential story leads. At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows enabled time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage to be published in a fraction of the time previously required, and audio archives in storage for decades were transcribed. The body also says the institute learned that trust matters more than technology, that projects should start with the problem rather than with AI, and that collaboration accelerates innovation — with The Baltimore Banner drawing on work developed by The Philadelphia Inquirer's team.

The expansion's stakes appear to hinge on whether the institute can turn individual fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, playbooks, and technical resources intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations. Success would likely depend on sustaining the cross-newsroom learning that emerged organically during the pilot and on whether a new group of news organizations joins the cohort. For local newsrooms without in-house AI engineering staff, that shared infrastructure could be the difference between experimenting alone and adopting tools already tested by peers.