The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a U.S. nonprofit, has announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, which places AI engineers inside local news organizations. OpenAI has committed a new $5 million (about 790 million yen), along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI says this doubles its previous support for the program[1].

The Next Phase After Two Years

The program launched in 2024 with AI engineering fellows embedded in 11 major American news organizations. The Lenfest Institute describes it as the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism[1].

Fellows work as full-time AI technologists alongside newsroom leaders, reporters, product teams, revenue staff and executives. They build practical AI tools tailored to each organization's challenges, and help draft safe, transparent and ethical policies[1]. A new group of news organizations will be invited to join the next phase, and several fellows are expected to stay on as full-time employees[1].

Results From Inside the Newsrooms

The announcement highlights several projects from participating organizations.

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, the fellowship supported Dewey, a tool that helps journalists search decades of archived reporting, and Scrape, a monitoring tool that turned a roughly 15-hour-per-week reporting task into a daily digest of potential story leads from around the region[1].

At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows made it possible to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage in a fraction of the previous time, and to transcribe audio archives of Chicago news and culture that had sat in storage for decades[1]. Other participants have worked on advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, print-to-digital production transition and operational efficiency[1].

The projects also began to travel between newsrooms. Fellows shared code and ideas, and The Baltimore Banner drew on work from The Philadelphia Inquirer's team to build its own news discovery tools[1].

Three Lessons From the Pilot

The announcement lists several lessons from the pilot[1].

The first is that trust matters more than technology. Locally hired engineers embedded for two years focused on understanding editorial workflows, culture and user needs rather than pushing adoption as outside consultants. As trust grew, journalists came to see fellows as teammates and brought the resulting tools into their daily work.

The second is to start with the problem, not with AI. The strongest projects began with a clearly defined challenge, and relied on close collaboration with users, small-scale experiments and ongoing evaluation.

The third is that collaboration accelerates innovation, as one newsroom's breakthrough often became another's starting point.

What the Expansion Aims to Do

The next phase keeps fellows embedded in participating organizations while widening the range of news organizations involved. The Lenfest Institute will also expand its technical capabilities to turn the strongest projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides and playbooks meant to benefit hundreds of news organizations[1]. The goal is to make a tool or workflow built in one organization available as shared infrastructure for the wider news field.

Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich said responsible AI adoption is less about the technology and more about trust[1]. Tom Rubin, OpenAI's Chief of Intellectual Property and Content, said local news plays a vital role in building community and that OpenAI is excited to expand the partnership[1].

※1 USD = 158 JPY (approximate, based on the October 2, 2026 midpoint rate)

Summary

OpenAI and the Lenfest Institute are expanding a fellowship that embeds AI engineers in local newsrooms, with OpenAI doubling its support. Over two years the program produced archive search, story-lead monitoring, translation and audio transcription tools, and projects began to be shared across newsrooms. The next phase aims to package successful work into reusable resources for many more news organizations.

出典:https://openai.com/index/lenfest-ai-collaborative-expansion