2026年9月28日

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Lenfest新闻研究所通过扩大对OpenAI的支持，推动标志性项目发展

视频由Lenfest新闻研究所提供

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实践中的证明
我们的经验教训
下一步计划

一个地方新闻业的未来典范

以下为Lenfest新闻研究所与OpenAI于2026年9月28日（星期一）联合发布的公告。

Lenfest新闻研究所今日宣布启动Lenfest AI协作与奖学金项目的下一阶段，该项目已成为美国新闻界规模最大的AI奖学金项目。

自2024年启动以来，该项目已在11家美国主要新闻机构中派驻AI工程研究员，实践证明，嵌入式AI工程师能够帮助地方新闻机构加速创新、增强商业可持续性，并负责任地采用新兴技术。随着OpenAI新增500万美元的承诺，以及高达500万美元的软件积分和工程支持，该项目将进一步扩大规模。OpenAI对项目的支持力度已翻倍。

此次扩展建立在OpenAI更广泛的支持新闻业工作的基础之上。

Lenfest AI协作与奖学金项目将全职AI技术人员派驻至运营中的新闻机构，以推动地方新闻业的商业创新。在过去两年中，该项目已从一项雄心勃勃的试点演变为一个经过验证的模式，帮助地方新闻机构建立采用AI以支持转型所需的护栏和策略。

随着AI协作与奖学金项目进入下一阶段，Lenfest研究所将邀请一批新的新闻机构加入该批次，以进一步推动负责任的AI实验和实施。

AI工程研究员与新闻编辑室领导、记者、产品团队、营收人员及高管并肩工作，识别各组织特有的挑战，构建实用的AI工程解决方案，以及安全、透明和合乎伦理的政策。他们的工作旨在加强新闻机构的力量，同时保留地方新闻业核心的人类判断力、编辑完整性、专业知识和信任——事实上，预计多名工程研究员将在多家机构留任为全职员工，这证明了其派驻工作的价值。

在11家参与机构中，研究员们展示了AI如何支持广泛的功能，从受众互动和新闻产品开发，到调查性新闻报道研究、广告与读者营收运营，以及扩大员工报道影响力和社区覆盖范围。

试点还揭示出，成功的AI采用不仅取决于技术本身，同样依赖于信任、协作以及对组织需求的清晰理解。嵌入式研究员在当地招聘并融入其所服务的机构，学习记者的工作方式，并构建根植于新闻编辑室和业务团队真实需求的解决方案。

“Lenfest AI协作与奖学金项目前两年最有价值的经验教训是，负责任的AI采用更少关乎技术，而更多关乎信任。研究员们帮助其所在新闻机构构建了实用工具，并通过明确的护栏、政策标准和开放沟通，从内部推动文化变革。”Lenfest研究所执行董事兼首席执行官Jim Friedlich表示，“协作与奖学金项目的下一阶段为更多新闻企业提供了机会，使其在最高编辑标准下，并以人类新闻判断力为首要考量，有意识地开展AI实验。”

“在合作的前两年里，看到记者们将人工智能作为工具来帮助提供高质量的本地新闻，并涌现出如此多实用的案例，这令人欣喜。”OpenAI知识产权与内容主管Tom Rubin表示。“本地新闻在构建让人口、城镇或城市真正拥有社区归属感的纽带方面发挥着至关重要的作用。我们很高兴能扩大与Lenfest研究所的合作，支持更多记者投身于这项重要的工作。”

实践中的证明

当该奖学金项目启动时，生成式人工智能在本地新闻机构内部的应用仍 largely 未经充分验证。在过去两年中，参与机构开发了实际应用，展示了人工智能如何支持新闻业务的方方面面。

在《费城询问报》，该奖学金支持开发了Dewey工具，帮助记者搜索数十年的存档报道；以及Scrape监控工具，将每周约15小时的报道任务转化为来自报纸所在区域各地的潜在选题线索的日常摘要。

在芝加哥公共媒体，人工智能辅助的翻译工作流程使该机构能够以过去所需时间的一小部分发布对时效性要求高的西班牙语报道，并转录反映芝加哥新闻和文化的音频档案，这些档案已在存储中存放了数十年。在其他参与机构中，项目涉及广告 prospecting（潜在客户开发）、捐赠者建模、受众个性化、订阅增长、公共会议监控、从印刷到数字的生产转型以及运营效率提升。

collectively，这些项目表明，人工智能的潜力远不止于提升记者的影响力和生产力。它可以在保留并赋予记者在生产可信、独立报道中核心角色的同时，加强现代新闻机构的几乎每一个职能。

AI协作联盟的项目也开始在新闻室之间传播。奖学金获得者共享代码，互相借鉴想法，比较实施策略，并在同行机构开发的工作基础上进行拓展。起源于一个新闻室的工具和思路成为解决其他地方相关问题的起点，证明了通过该奖学金开发的创新可以远远超越单一组织的范围。

我们学到的经验

在试点过程中，出现了几个重要的教训：

信任比技术更重要：在机构内部嵌入本地招聘的工程师长达两年被证明具有变革性。奖学金获得者并非作为旨在强行推动人工智能采用的外部顾问，而是致力于深入了解各新闻业务部门的编辑工作流程、组织文化和用户需求。奖学金获得者通常通过倾听、与员工相处、了解他们的工作方式、识别反复出现的痛点，并与最终用户共同构建解决方案来发现宝贵的机会。随着信任的建立，采用率也随之提高，记者们越来越将奖学金获得者视为可以合作解决有意义问题的团队成员——向他们提出自己的想法和挑战，并将由此产生的工具纳入日常工作。

从问题出发，而非从人工智能出发：在整个群体中，奖学金获得者发现，最成功的项目始于明确定义的挑战，而非预设的技术解决方案。成功的项目是通过与用户的紧密合作、小规模实验、持续评估以及关注技术是否真正改善工作来构建的。

协作加速创新：一家新闻机构的突破往往成为另一家新闻机构的起点。例如，《巴尔的摩旗帜报》在构建自身新闻发现工具时，借鉴了《费城询问报》团队开发的成果。该批次的学员之间同样交换了代码、产品理念、技术方法和经验教训，使得各机构能够以比独立运作更快的速度共同进步。

下一步计划

AI协作与奖学金项目的下一阶段将在巩固现有项目基础的同时，大幅扩大其市场覆盖面。该项目将继续在参与的新闻机构中派驻AI专员，坚持帮助这些机构进行转型，以满足现代用户的需求。Lenfest研究所还将扩大奖学金范围，涵盖更广泛的新闻机构。

同时，Lenfest研究所将扩展其技术能力，致力于主动将最优质的奖学金项目成果转化为可复用的工具、框架、插件、实施指南、操作手册和技术资源，旨在惠及数百家新闻机构。提供实施支持的一个目标，是让试点期间自然形成的跨新闻机构学习过程更易于持续和规模化，从而使某一机构内部开发的工具、工作流程或技术突破能够成为整个新闻行业的共享基础设施。

这些努力共同代表了从成功实验向可扩展影响力的演变，创造出切实可行的AI解决方案，其影响将远远超出奖学金项目本身，进一步巩固地方新闻业。

地方新闻未来的典范

通过将嵌入式的AI工程专业知识与共享工具、技术基础设施及跨组织学习相结合，Lenfest研究所致力于确保在少数几家新闻机构内部开发的创新最终能够惠及数百家更多机构。

与OpenAI的 renewed（重新加强）且日益紧密的合作关系反映了一个共同信念：当新闻机构具备安全应用AI所需的专业知识、基础设施和协作网络时，地方新闻业将从AI中获益最多。通过规模化推广奖学金项目中行之有效的做法，Lenfest研究所专注于帮助更多新闻机构利用新兴技术来强化新闻报道、构建可持续的业务模式，并更好地服务其所在社区。

2026年
作者
OpenAI
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The Lenfest Institute grows landmark program with expanded OpenAI support

Video courtesy of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism

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Proof in practice
What we learned
What’s next
A model for the future of local journalism

The following was issued as a joint announcement on Monday, September 28, 2026, from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and OpenAI.

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism today announced the next phase of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, building on what has become the largest AI fellowship program in American journalism.

Since its launch in 2024 with AI engineering fellows in 11 major American news organizations, the program has demonstrated that embedded AI engineers can help local news organizations accelerate innovation, strengthen business sustainability, and responsibly adopt emerging technology. The program will expand with a new $5 million commitment from OpenAI, along with up to $5 million in software credits and engineering support. OpenAI has doubled its previous support of the program.

This expansion builds on OpenAI’s broader work supporting journalism.

The Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program places full-time AI technologists into operating news organizations to drive business innovation in local journalism. Over the past two years, the program has evolved from an ambitious pilot into a proven model for helping local news organizations develop guardrails and strategies for adopting AI to support their transformation.

As the AI Collaborative and Fellowship enters its next stage, The Lenfest Institute will invite a new group of news organizations to join the cohort to further responsible AI experimentation and implementation.

AI engineering fellows work 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. Their work is designed to strengthen news organizations while preserving the human judgment, editorial integrity, expertise, and trust at the heart of local journalism — in fact, several engineering fellows are expected to stay on as full-time employees at multiple organizations, speaking to the value of their deployment.

Across the 11 participating organizations, fellows have demonstrated how AI can support a wide range of functions, from audience engagement and news product development to investigative news research, advertising and reader revenue operations, and expanded staff reporting impact and community reach.

The pilot also revealed that successful AI adoption depends as much on trust, collaboration, and a clear understanding of organizational needs as it does on the technology itself. Embedded fellows were hired locally and became part of the organizations they served, learning how journalists work and building solutions rooted in the real needs of newsroom and business teams.

“The most valuable lesson of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship’s first two years is that responsible AI adoption is less about the technology and more about trust. The fellows have helped their news organizations build practical tools and drive culture change from the inside — through clear guardrails, policy standards, and open communication,” said Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich. “The next phase of the Collaborative and Fellowship Program is an opportunity for more news enterprises to intentionally experiment with AI under the highest editorial standards and with human news judgment at the forefront.”

“Over the first two years of this partnership, it’s been wonderful to see so many practical examples of journalists using AI as a tool to help deliver quality local news,” said Tom Rubin, OpenAI Chief of Intellectual Property and Content. “Local news plays a vital role in building the human connections that make a neighborhood, town, or city truly feel like a community. We’re excited to expand our partnership with The Lenfest Institute to support even more journalists in this important work.”

Proof in practice

When the fellowship launched, generative AI was still largely untested inside local news organizations. Over the past two years, participating organizations have developed practical applications⁠ that demonstrate how AI can support the full breadth of the news enterprise.

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

At Chicago Public Media, AI-assisted translation workflows enabled the organization to publish time-sensitive Spanish-language coverage in a fraction of the time previously required, and to transcribe audio archives reflecting Chicago news and culture that had been in storage for decades. Across other participating organizations, projects have addressed advertising prospecting, donor modeling, audience personalization, subscription growth, public-meeting monitoring, print-to-digital production transition, and operational efficiency.

Collectively, these projects demonstrated that AI’s potential extends far beyond improvements in journalist impact and productivity. It can strengthen nearly every function of a modern news organization while preserving and empowering journalists' central role in producing trusted, independent reporting.

The AI Collaborative’s projects also began to travel from newsroom to newsroom. Fellows shared code, adapted one another’s ideas, compared implementation strategies, and built on work developed at peer organizations. Tools and approaches originating in one newsroom became starting points for solving related problems elsewhere, demonstrating how innovation developed through the fellowship can extend well beyond a single organization.

What we learned

Over the course of the pilot, several important lessons emerged:

Trust matters more than technology: Embedding locally hired engineers inside organizations for two years proved transformational. Rather than serving as outside consultants with a mission to force AI adoption, fellows worked to develop a deep understanding of editorial workflows, organizational culture, and user needs across each respective news business. Fellows often identified valuable opportunities through listening, spending time with staff, understanding how they worked, identifying recurring pain points, and building solutions alongside the people who would ultimately use them. As trust grew, so did adoption, with journalists increasingly seeing fellows as team members they could collaborate with to solve meaningful problems — bringing their own ideas and challenges to fellows and incorporating the resulting tools into their daily work.

Start with the problem, not with AI: Across the cohort, fellows found that the strongest projects began with a clearly defined challenge rather than a predetermined technical solution. Successful projects were built through close collaboration with users, small-scale experimentation, ongoing evaluation, and a focus on whether the technology meaningfully improved the work.

Collaboration accelerates innovation: One newsroom’s breakthrough frequently became another newsroom’s starting point. The Baltimore Banner, for example, drew on work developed by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s team while building the Banner’s own news discovery tools. Fellows across the cohort have similarly exchanged code, product ideas, technical approaches, and lessons learned, allowing organizations to advance faster together than they could independently.

What’s next

The next phase of the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program builds on the fellowship's foundation while significantly expanding its market reach. The program will continue to embed AI fellows within participating news organizations, maintaining its commitment to helping those organizations transform to meet the needs of modern users. The Lenfest Institute will also broaden the fellowship to include a wider range of news organizations.

At the same time, The Lenfest Institute will expand its technical capabilities to help proactively turn the strongest fellowship projects into reusable tools, frameworks, plugins, implementation guides, playbooks, and technical resources intended to benefit hundreds of news organizations. One goal of providing implementation support is to make the cross-newsroom learning that emerged organically during the pilot easier to sustain and scale, so that a tool, workflow, or technical breakthrough developed inside one organization can become shared infrastructure for the broader news field.

Together, these efforts represent an evolution from successful experimentation toward scalable impact, creating practical AI solutions that can strengthen local journalism well beyond the fellowship itself.

A model for the future of local journalism

By combining embedded AI engineering expertise with shared tools, technical infrastructure, and cross-organizational learning, The Lenfest Institute seeks to ensure that innovations developed inside a handful of newsrooms can ultimately benefit hundreds more.

The renewed and growing partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared belief that local journalism can benefit most from AI when news organizations have the expertise, infrastructure, and collaborative networks to apply it safely. By scaling what has worked across the fellowship, The Lenfest Institute is focused on helping more news organizations use emerging technology to strengthen their journalism, build sustainable businesses, and better serve their communities.

2026
Author
OpenAI
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