The Lenfest Institute for Journalism has announced a $150,000 grant to The San Francisco Standard to develop an AI-powered news app designed to reimagine how audiences interact with local information.
The Standard joins the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship, a collective of 10 news organizations exploring how AI can drive business outcomes such as new audiences, new forms of monetization and scale. Each organization in the Collaborative embeds AI engineers and receives software support from Microsoft and OpenAI. The Collaborative is committed to sharing its case studies and findings with the broader news industry.
The Standard’s project will explore Mode 2 AI strategies, which leverage new interfaces and product formats enabled by advanced generative AI. While Mode 1 AI focuses on optimizing existing workflows and efficiency, Mode 2 emphasizes learning, experimentation and a shift toward AI-native journalism that can be fine-tuned to user needs.
