OpenAI Expands Journalism Support to U.S. Schools and Newsrooms

OpenAI expanded its journalism-support work into journalism education on September 8, naming the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at CUNY’s Newmark J-School and the Knight Lab at Northwestern University’s Medill School as its first education partners in the new initiative.

During the 2026–2027 academic year, the company said it will provide more than 400 ChatGPT Edu subscriptions to interested graduate students and faculty across the two schools. OpenAI did not disclose how it will divide the subscriptions, what they are worth or whether the program will continue beyond that academic year.

The initiative brings together tools, training, partnerships, shared learning and practical support for students, educators, journalists and news organizations, OpenAI said. The company called the two school collaborations the first partnerships in the latest phase of its journalism work. It said other education efforts are underway but did not name additional schools.

OpenAI said ChatGPT Edu includes enterprise-level privacy, permission and administrative controls. The company also said inputs and outputs from Edu workspaces are not used to train its models by default, in line with its published business-data policy. The announcement did not report implementation results for the new education collaborations.

The classroom expansion follows a Ukraine-focused journalism program that OpenAI announced a day earlier with the Association of Independent Regional Press Publishers of Ukraine and WAN-IFRA. That program pairs a masterclass series with a 12-week accelerator for 10 selected Ukrainian news organizations and provides participants with OpenAI API credits. WAN-IFRA said the masterclasses began August 5 and the accelerator was scheduled to start September 17.

OpenAI also placed the education effort alongside its existing programs for newsrooms, publishers and industry associations. In July, the American Journalism Project said OpenAI had renewed support for its Product & AI Studio with an additional $5 million over two years and $3 million in service credits, including optional ChatGPT Enterprise and API access across the nonprofit’s portfolio.