The two tech giants have announced grants of up to $10 million, distributed to prominent local media outlets, including Chicago Public Media, the Minnesota Star Tribune, Newsday in Long Island, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Seattle Times.
These publications will each recruit an AI fellow for two years, tasked with developing innovative AI-driven projects to boost business sustainability and newsroom efficiency. Three additional media outlets will be awarded similar grants in a second round of funding.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft are contributing $2.5 million in direct funding, alongside a further $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits to support the adoption of AI technology. The Lenfest Institute of Journalism collaborates on the initiative and announced the news today.
The project underscores a growing effort by tech companies to help struggling news organisations by offering advanced tools and financial support to secure their futures.
Historically, the relationship between AI companies and the media has been fraught, often marred by legal battles. OpenAI and Microsoft have faced lawsuits from major outlets, including The Center for Investigative Reporting, The New York Times, and The Intercept.
Accusations range from plagiarism, claims that AI tools like ChatGPT have replicated entire articles, to allegations that AI models were trained using web content without permission or adequate compensation. Meanwhile, some media organisations have opted for negotiation over litigation, with Condé Nast recently securing a deal with OpenAI that grants rights to their content for AI use.
While this initiative indicates how AI might be integrated into journalism, it does not answer the central problems as to why newspaper journalism is dying out. Its central problem is that newspaper funding (either internet or print) has dried up due to the loss of advertising. Desperate measures to turn newspapers into entertainment discredited the model until no one was sure if anyone was writing the truth or opinion. AI in the newsrooms will not make any of those problems disappear.
