The "2026 FIFA World Cup in North and Central America" has ended. I am not a football fanatic, but I do make sure to watch the World Cup. There is considerable fun in watching the goal scenes through highlights. Now that it is over, I feel a sense of emptiness. In truth, for our people, this World Cup already ended a month ago when we lost to South Africa. Watching people from the countries that reached the finals cheer, I felt only envy and regret. Since the group-stage elimination, there has been loud criticism directed at the football association leadership and the head coach. The complaint is: how could such a worst-ever result be produced when the greatest individual talents in history, including Son Heung-min and Lee Kang-in, were gathered together? Why did a team made up of such outstanding players produce the worst result?
The sum of individual capabilities is not organizational capability. These days, most journalists also use artificial intelligence (AI). They organize materials, draft outlines, and easily handle repetitive tasks. Individual journalists say they save time and feel their productivity has risen. But just because individuals move faster does not mean the entire flow of the organization automatically speeds up as well. I have not heard that this has translated into the performance of the news organization. There is no news that reporting quality has improved, that errors have decreased, or that reader trust has risen. On the contrary, complaints that the errors editors must filter out have increased can be heard both inside and outside the newsroom.
This is not the concern of news organizations alone. According to a report by the MIT Media Lab in the United States, 95% of companies that adopted generative AI failed to produce meaningful financial results. One study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed some 6,000 executives across four countries and reported that 90% of respondents said AI had contributed almost nothing to productivity over the past three years. In an experiment conducted on developers, those who used AI coding tools worked 55.8% faster, but the product release cycle was not actually shortened. This was because the organizational bottleneck of review, approval, and deployment after coding remained the same. The more a service directly deals with users, the more dangerous this bottleneck becomes. Applying AI hastily to customer complaint handling services worsened the customer experience.
News organizations are no different. Even if the speed of writing articles has increased, if the fact-checking, editing, and editorial systems remain the same as before, the organization's output does not change. It is a kind of "shadow AI," where individual efficiency stays in each person's drawer without being integrated into the organization's system.
The regrettable result of this World Cup stemmed from the absence of a system within the football association that failed to properly verify and supplement the coach's capabilities. It was an expected result brought about by incompetence and irresponsibility. The reality that news organizations currently face is similar. They rely only on individual journalists' AI utilization capabilities, while systems at the newsroom level are not prepared. Technology is evolving faster than ever, yet the system stays the same. The newsroom needs to be redesigned: at what stage and in what manner AI should be deployed, how to innovate the editing and verification structure, and how to assign the subject of final judgment and responsibility.
If news organizations leave AI utilization solely to individual journalists' "personal skills" while failing to achieve systemic innovation across the entire newsroom, they too may repeat the disaster of this World Cup, which produced the worst result even after gathering the best players.
