Newsrooms Receive AI Grants Funded By OpenAI and Microsoft

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism is partnering with OpenAI and Microsoft to help newsrooms explore artificial intelligence and how it can drive sustainability in local journalism. 

A total of $10 million will be awarded by OpenAI and Microsoft, with each providing $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in enterprise credits. 

Each organization will receive a grant to hire a two-year AI fellow who will pursue projects that focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies, The Lenfest Institute says. 

The recipients include: 

  • Chicago Public Media, parent of Chicago Sun-Times and public radio station WBEZ, seeks to leverage AI for transcription, summarization and translation. 
  • The Minnesota Star Tribune hopes to experiment with AI summarization, analysis and content discovery for journalists and readers. 
  • Newsday, the Long Island daily, will build AI public data summarization and aggregation tools for its newsroom; this will also be offered to businesses as a marketing service.
  • The Philadelphia Inquirer will use AI to build a conversational search interface for its archives and to monitor and analyze media produced by local municipalities and agencies. 
  • The Seattle Times will use AI to assist in advertising go-to-market, sales training support, and other sales analytics; it will then roll out what it learns to other departments. 
 “We hope these news organizations will be lighthouses for the industry, to provide examples of how AI can build a better future for the business of news,” says Teresa Hutson, corporate vice president, technology for fundamental rights at Microsoft.

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