Navigating the frontier between
human expertise and AI
Frontier Collective is led by Aimee Rinehart, an industry leader in news innovation with over two decades of experience at the intersection of journalism and technology. From the early web era at The New York Times to pioneering AI strategy at the Associated Press, Aimee brings deep expertise in helping organizations navigate technological disruption while staying true to their mission.
Frontier Collective partners with news organizations, media companies, and mission-driven businesses to develop AI strategies grounded in real-world needs. Drawing on experience leading AI initiatives at the Associated Press — including launching the to-market product AP Verify and consulting 15 news operations on automation blueprints — we help organizations identify where AI fits within their existing workflows, evaluate commercial tools against their values, and build roadmaps that balance innovation with editorial integrity.
Our consulting engagements start with your news value chain — newsgathering, production, distribution, and business operations — and pinpoint the daily friction points where thoughtful technology can make the biggest difference.
Frontier Collective is more than one person. We bring together a trusted network of innovators, researchers, product leaders, and technologists with deep expertise across journalism, AI ethics, data strategy, and organizational change — matched to the specific needs of your organization. Whether you're a local newsroom, a national media brand, an information nonprofit, or a mission-bound business, we assemble the right team for the challenge.
Moving from AI curiosity to AI capability requires more than a tool demo. Frontier Collective provides hands-on enablement that transforms how teams work, developing courses tailored to the learning required and creating open-source bespoke AI projects with your staff.
We've designed year-long training programs on covering AI across every beat, built frameworks for ethical AI adoption, and helped newsrooms create their own AI ethics policies and transparency principles. Enablement means your team doesn't just use AI tools — they understand them, question them, and own the decisions around them.
From one-hour executive briefings to intensive two-day bootcamps, Frontier Collective delivers training tailored to your team's experience level and goals. Aimee has led AI bootcamps at Indiana University and the University of Montana, taught executive courses at UT Austin's School of Journalism, coached in CUNY's Newmark AI Journalism Lab, and delivered a Knight Center online course on generative AI and news to more than 10,000 participants worldwide.
Workshop formats include hands-on hackathons where participants build and deploy AI tools, deep dives into accountability reporting on AI, and practical sessions on prompt engineering and tool evaluation. Every session is grounded in real use cases, not hype.
Frontier Collective sits at the leading edge of the conversation about AI's role in journalism and society. Aimee's CUNY capstone project proposed a participatory journalism LLM — a language model built on licensed, ethically procured news data, governed cooperatively by the newsrooms that contribute to it. This work envisions a model where journalism owns its AI infrastructure rather than renting it from commercial products that serve different missions than the news industry.
Currently advancing a small language model pilot in Minnesota with newsrooms and university partners, this research explores how the news industry can build its own AI tools aligned with accuracy, attribution, fairness and transparency, and how to gain a financial foothold in the AI economy.
Founded by Aimee in November 2024, Humans in the Loop brings together news innovators — product leaders, technologists, editors, and researchers working at the intersection of journalism and AI.
We gather every other month at a pub in midtown Manhattan for drinks, conversation and honest talk that goes beyond talking points. On the alternating months, we meet to dig into a specific provocation — topics we've tackled include the environmental cost of data centers, AI policy and its implications for the press, AI use in newsrooms, AI nudifiers and the abuse of consent, journalism's portrayal in media, and other questions we find genuinely interesting and unresolved. Every session is shaped by the people in the room.
In an industry that can be hostile to new ideas, this community provides a space to share what's working, challenge what isn't, and build the solidarity needed to navigate disruption together. Because if we're going to get through this time, we're going to need one another.
Tell us how we can help. Choose a topic below and we'll be in touch.