OpenAI announced an expansion of its journalism initiatives on September 8. For the 2026–27 academic year, it says it will provide more than 400 ChatGPT Edu subscriptions to interested graduate students and faculty at CUNY’s Newmark J-School and Northwestern’s Medill School.
The company is working with Newmark’s Tow-Knight Center and Medill’s Knight Lab. It also describes support for news organizations through existing partnerships, including the American Journalism Project. The school initiative is a named institutional program, not an open funding call for any publisher.
For editors and creators, the practical question is how participants use these tools while retaining responsibility for reporting and verification. OpenAI names tasks such as archive search and public-record analysis. This announcement establishes access and training plans; it does not provide an independent evaluation of their effect on journalism.