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 started

05:34 — Can newsrooms trust big tech partners?

08:33 — How the fellowship works day to day

14:52– Inside the Microsoft hackathon that built Dewey in two weeks

21:37 — Training journalists to understand LLM limitations

24:07 — How AI literacy has changed newsroom culture

29:45 – How small newsrooms can get started with AI

35:14 — AI answers, search decline, and the future of audience traffic

38:15 — Rethinking journalism’s role in an AI-mediated world

41:23 — Closing reflections and personal AI use

This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

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