Jim Friedlich, David Chivers & Matt Boggie: How the Lenfest AI Collaborative placed AI engineers in 10 newsrooms

The Philadelphia Inquirer never had an AI engineer on staff until the Lenfest AI Collaborative & Fellowship program changed that.The collaborative is a $5 million partnership between the Lenfest Institute, OpenAI, and Microsoft that placed 10 AI fellows in American newsrooms for two years. These engineers work within the organizations, building tools that solve real newsroom problems.This week on Newsroom Robots, host Nikita Roy sits down with Jim Friedlich, CEO and Executive Director of the Lenfest Institute, David Chivers, lead advisor to the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Matt Boggie, CTO of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to walk through how the program works and what the Inquirer has built as a result.The Inquirer came to the collaborative with an idea to build a full-archive search tool that would let reporters query decades of journalism. They expected it to take 24 months. Within two weeks of a Microsoft hackathon, they had working code. The tool, now called Dewey, searches everything the Inquirer has published since 1978.This episode covers:03:02 — How the Lenfest AI Collaborative got started05:34 — Can newsrooms trust big tech partners?08:33 — How the fellowship works day to day14:52– Inside the Microsoft hackathon that built Dewey in two weeks21:37 — Training journalists to understand LLM limitations24:07 — How AI literacy has changed newsroom culture29:45 – How small newsrooms can get started with AI35:14 — AI answers, search decline, and the future of audience traffic38:15 — Rethinking journalism’s role in an AI-mediated world41:23 — Closing reflections and personal AI useThis episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Sign up for the Newsroom Robots newsletter for episode summaries and insights from host Nikita Roy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.