OpenAI is doubling its support for the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program with another $10 million.
The new commitment includes $5 million in cash and $5 million in product credits, Nieman Lab reported Monday. OpenAI is funding this round single-handedly.
Microsoft matched OpenAI’s original contribution when the fellowship launched in October 2024. It has not decided whether to renew its support after its current funding cycle ends in 2027.
The program has placed full-time AI engineers in 11 U.S. news organizations for two-year fellowships. Most are metro newsrooms, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Banner and The Minnesota Star Tribune.
The next grant cycle will keep that model while considering a wider range of applicants. Lenfest says it is interested in local TV news and statewide public service journalism. It has not said those organizations will necessarily receive fellowships.
“The key success factor seems to be that the fellows are hired locally, report locally, and are viewed as part of their local team,” Lenfest CEO Jim Friedlich told Nieman Lab.
In every participating newsroom, Friedlich said, the fellow became its first full-time AI employee.
The first cohort has also produced tools that other newsrooms can reuse.
At the Inquirer, fellow Kevin Hoffman built Dewey, a chatbot for searching the newspaper’s digitized archives. The archive stretches back to the 1970s. Fellows at The Baltimore Banner and Chicago Public Media later adapted the tool for their own organizations. The code is open-source on GitHub.
Lenfest wants more projects to travel between newsrooms in the next round. It hired Sonali Verma of INMA to write a newsletter sharing tools and lessons from the fellowship. Chase Davis, formerly of the Star Tribune’s AI Lab, is joining as technical lead. He will help newsrooms turn projects into reusable products.
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The OpenAI credits have also helped participating newsrooms experiment without absorbing every technology cost themselves.
Matt Boggie, the Inquirer’s chief technology and product officer, told Nieman Lab the credits have been important for prototyping and deployment. The newsroom recently processed more than 270,000 archival images at about 5 cents each.
“Every token costs something,” Boggie said. “I would much rather do that under these credits than on my own dime.”
OpenAI has been expanding its other journalism programs as well. It recently renewed its funding of the American Journalism Project’s Product & AI Studio. Separately, OpenAI says it is providing more than 400 ChatGPT subscriptions to interested students and faculty at Medill and CUNY. Nieman described those as enterprise-level ChatGPT accounts; OpenAI’s own announcement identifies them as ChatGPT Edu subscriptions.
The investment comes as local news organizations continue to cut jobs. Media Copilot has tracked journalism layoffs in 2026, including recent reductions at McClatchy and USA Today Co.
Lenfest is encouraging all 11 current participants to apply again. Friedlich said no more than half are likely to return, leaving room for new organizations.
One condition is clear. Lenfest says it will not fund newsrooms that plan to use AI primarily to replace human reporting and writing.
“We believe really strongly that there should be a human in the lead, not just a human in the loop,” Friedlich said.
The next round will test how far newsrooms can push AI without letting it replace the journalism the program is meant to support.
