The Local Independent News Coalition

A community of independent metro news organizations

The Local Independent News Coalition consists of anchor news organizations in eight major American cities, which play an essential role in informing their substantial public audiences.

LINC members include:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Chicago Public Media
The Dallas Morning News
Newsday (Long Island, New York)
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Seattle Times
The Minnesota Star Tribune
The Tampa Bay Times

The eight independent members of the Coalition meet regularly to discuss common challenges and opportunities, compare data benchmarking, and identify opportunities for shared services and experimentation.

Membership in LINC is by invitation only. For more information, please contact Lenfest Institute Chief Operating Officer Ken Herts.

Lenfest Institute AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program

In October 2024, The Lenfest Institute launched the AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program in partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft. The program is designed to help local newsrooms explore ways in which artificial intelligence can help drive business sustainability and innovation.

In the initial round of the program, five of the LINC newsrooms will each receive a grant to hire a two-year AI fellow to pursue projects that focus largely on improving business sustainability and implementing AI technologies within their organizations. The fellowship will also provide OpenAI and Microsoft Azure credits to help these publications experiment and develop tools to assist with local news.

As part of the program, the news organizations will work collaboratively with each other and the broader news industry to share leanings, product developments, case studies, and technical information needed to help replicate their work in other newsrooms.

Project overviews

The five newsrooms will work on projects that focus on the use of AI for analysis of public data, to better utilize news and visual archives, to build audience engagement, for creating new AI-based news tools and products, and more.

Chicago Public Media

Chicago Public Media, which publishes The Chicago Sun-Times and runs public radio station WBEZ, will focus on leveraging AI for transcription, summarization and translation to expand content offerings and reach new audiences. 

The Minnesota Star Tribune

The Star Tribune will experiment with AI summarization, analysis and content discovery for both its journalists and readers. 

Newsday

Newsday will build AI public data summarization and aggregation tools for its newsroom, for readers, and for businesses as a marketing services offering. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Inquirer will use AI platforms to build a conversational search interface for its archives. It will also leverage AI to monitor and analyze media produced by local municipalities and agencies. 

The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times will use AI platforms to assist in advertising go-to-market, sales training support, and other sales analytics before rolling out learnings to other business functions and departments. 