This episode of Newsroom Robots is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
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, I sit 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.
In this episode, we cover:
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
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Jim Friedlich, David Chivers and Matt Boggie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
P.S. I wrote a piece in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2026 titled “AI Will Rewrite the Architecture of the Newsroom.” It looks at how AI is reshaping news discovery and why 2026 is the inflection point for rebuilding newsroom infrastructure.
