OpenAI is putting ChatGPT into journalism schools

OpenAI is expanding its involvement in journalism education with new partnerships at two major US journalism schools.

The company is working with CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications during the 2026–2027 academic year.

More than 400 ChatGPT Edu subscriptions will be made available to interested graduate students and faculty across the two institutions.

The programs are intended to give future journalists practical experience using generative AI inside reporting and newsroom workflows.

That can include areas such as research, data analysis, transcription, document review and experimentation with new reporting formats.

The initiative is significant because journalism has had a complicated relationship with generative AI.

News organizations are experimenting with AI-assisted workflows while simultaneously confronting questions around accuracy, copyright, attribution, newsroom employment and the use of published journalism to train models.

OpenAI itself is involved in major copyright litigation with The New York Times and authors over the use of copyrighted material in AI training.

That makes journalism education a particularly interesting place for the technology to enter.

The next generation of reporters will likely need to understand both what generative AI can do and where it can fail.

Teaching those tools inside journalism schools could help move AI literacy from informal experimentation toward more explicit professional standards.