Partnering with Axios expands OpenAI’s work with the news industry

Partnering with Axios expands OpenAI’s work with the news industry | OpenAI

January 15, 2025

Partnering with Axios expands OpenAI’s work with the news industry

Publishers representing hundreds of newsrooms and content brands are using OpenAI partnerships and grant programs to adopt AI tools and strengthen the news ecosystem, while ChatGPT users gain access to information from leading, reliable publications.

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Over the past year, we set out to support a healthy news ecosystem by working with news organizations, listening to their feedback, and building solutions together. Our goal⁠ is to be a thoughtful partner—helping journalists with time-consuming tasks, improving ChatGPT’s understanding of sources of current news events, and offering new ways for publishers to reach readers through ChatGPT. We’re a young company putting significant investment into this work, which advances our mission by finding novel ways for news and tech to work together and benefit each other as well as our users.

Today, we are announcing a new content partnership with Axios, and funding to help expand its local news coverage by building newsrooms enabled by our technology in four new cities—Pittsburgh, Pa.; Kansas City, Mo.; Boulder, Colo.; and Huntsville, Ala.

> “We launched Axios Local nearly four years ago with the bold goal of bringing local news to communities across the country. OpenAI’s investment allows us to continue our expansion and aid us in bringing essential local news to deserving audiences.”

Jim VandeHei, Axios co-founder and CEO

We’ve now partnered with nearly 20 media organizations*, bringing our technology to more than 160 news outlets and hundreds of content brands in more than 20 languages across topics and continents.

The partnerships with publishers like News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Prisa Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, and Dotdash Meredith enable ChatGPT search⁠ to now feature select summaries and excerpts from trusted media outlets with clear citations and direct links to original sources. This helps to strengthen both the news ecosystem and our product, and makes it easier for our over 300 million weekly active users across over 150 countries⁠ to discover and engage with original news content, including from any publication that chooses to participate in our search ecosystem.

“Technology is one of the best tools we have to reach new readers and deepen our relationship with existing ones. By working with OpenAI, we’re figuring out ways to make discovering and sharing our journalism more intuitive. We want to use the tools of the future to help people discover our best reporting on the moment we’re in,” said Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic.

“Provenance and principle are culture cornerstones, which is why the partnership with Sam Altman and his trusty team has been profoundly important, not only for our thousands of journalists around the world, but for insight, for integrity and for actual intelligence. We live in an age permeated, poisoned by the faux and the fallacious, so OpenAI’s clear commitment to objective journalism, to genuinely trustworthy sources is crucial in ensuring that succeeding generations will have an understanding founded in fact,” said Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp.

Enhancing newsrooms, business operations and user experiences

In the next phase of our work⁠, including our latest partnership with Axios, we’re focusing on helping publishers more effectively integrate our tools to benefit their missions and their businesses.

Publishers are sparking new innovation in the AI era, and they are only getting started.

• The Associated Press⁠ is leveraging OpenAI technology to streamline news production and increase capabilities, with AP journalists playing a key role throughout the process. For example, AP’s AI-driven tools have increased Spanish language translations by 40% and doubled Portuguese translations. The technology also generates search-optimized headlines and suggests related articles to engage audiences more effectively. Additionally, AP is using AI tools to save hundreds of hours on data mining, as well as to provide tips from hundreds of federal agencies to local newsrooms.
• The Atlantic⁠ is experimenting with OpenAI technology for Atlantic Labs⁠, a research and development site—independent from its journalism—where its product team is incubating new ideas in a push to understand how the publisher can benefit from emerging tech. Two current experiments on the site that use OpenAI tech are Atlantic Companion⁠, a chatbot with access to The Atlantic’s 167-year archive; and Atlantic Explorer⁠, a guided journey through thematic articles.
• Axel Springer⁠ developed ‘ Hey_⁠,’ a user-friendly generative AI news assistant⁠ that makes Axel Springer’s journalism more interactive and personalized. Leveraging OpenAI technology, the tool allows readers to converse with the assistant casually—as simply as saying, “Hey_, what’s up?” or “Hey_, how can I eat healthily?”—on a wide range of topics to access personalized content. Since its launch in September 2023, ‘Hey_’ has answered more than 100 million questions on Europe’s largest news brand BILD, and is also integrated into WELT’s consumer experience. In October 2024, Business Insider introduced an AI-powered search⁠ feature powered by BI’s journalism and OpenAI technology to provide readers with its signature 3-bullet style search results in addition to contextual background information fueled by BI’s library of content.
• Dotdash Meredith⁠’s D/Cipher is a first-of-its-kind tool targeting ads based on what people are interested in—not using cookies or personal data. D/Cipher is now powered by OpenAI and it helps quickly analyze millions of connections across DDM content for smarter ad targeting. It’s now even better at understanding intent and helping target ads more accurately across the web.
• Financial Times⁠ uses ChatGPT Enterprise across nearly two-thirds of their global workforce, with 1,400 people using it every week. They are experimenting with AI to automate time-consuming, manual tasks and improve their audience’s experience, such as by using a custom GPT model to help identify proposed advertisements that don’t meet UK advertising industry standards. The proof of concept is yielding promising results, the FT said, and—if implemented—could give our legal team a helpful first flag when an ad may not meet ASA standards.
• Hearst⁠ is unlocking new ways to engage…