You don’t say you went to “history‑school” or “psych‑school.”

But you do say you went to “j‑school”.

That nickname isn’t cute; it’s a tell. Journalism turned itself into a club, not a craft. I always said being a journalist is like being in the mafia: once you’re in, you’re always in. And that mentality helped kill the industry.

I remember my own initiation ceremony: standing in front of Middlesex College at the University of Western Ontario, the self‑proclaimed cathedral of future news saviours. The building looked like something out of gothic fiction: stone, spires, an almost ecclesiastical sense of importance. Inside, we weren’t just students; we were “the next generation of journalists.” You weren’t learning a set of skills. You were being told you were now one of the Exceptionally Super Special people.

That’s what j‑school really sells: identity. You walk in as a person who wants to find things out and tell people the truth. You walk out as a “journalist” with a capital J. The degree is not just a credential; it’s a membership card. You learn the mythology of the profession, the sacred stories about Woodward and Bernstein (without the Canadian equivalents), the noble suffering for the public good. You learn how to talk like a journalist, dress like a journalist, and roll your eyes at people who “don’t understand how the media works.”

What you don’t get nearly enough of is what journalism actually is: a practice. A discipline of verifying, interviewing, checking, and admitting when you got it wrong. J‑school teaches you how to fit into a newsroom hierarchy far more than it teaches you how to build one, or how to function if that hierarchy collapses. The unspoken promise is simple: stay in the tribe, and the tribe will take care of you.

The mafia comparison isn’t a joke. Once you’re “in,” you’re in for life. You can leave a newsroom, but you still introduce yourself as a journalist at parties. You still instinctively defend “the media” as a bloc, even when it’s obviously wrong. You protect made men, look the other way at bad calls, and treat any serious critique as betrayal instead of an opportunity to fix things. The code of silence is softer than omertà, but it works the same way: you don’t talk about how the sausage is really made, especially not in public.

That identity armour might feel comforting when times are good. When the industry started to buckle under the weight of its own bad decisions, it became a trap. Social media and independent outlets weren’t just “noise”; they were a stress test. They exposed where journalism was rigid, where it ignored entire communities, and where the formulas no longer matched reality. Instead of asking, “What are we missing?” the profession defaulted to, “The public is misinformed.” The club closed ranks.

J‑school helped build that reflex. It trained generations of journalists to see themselves as separate from the people they covered and smarter than the people they served. You weren’t encouraged to see yourself as a citizen who happens to do journalism; you were told you were something above that, a professional observer. That distance made it much easier to dismiss criticism and much harder to see when the ground under the industry was cracking.

The irony is that journalism loves to talk about gatekeeping, but j‑school became the gate. You had to know the right programs, the right internships, the right unpaid gigs to even get in the building. That produced a press corps that looked similar, thought similarly, and shared the same blind spots. When the internet blew the gates open and anyone could report, blog, post video, or build a newsletter, the tribe didn’t adapt to the new reality. It sneered at it.

Standing outside that “cathedral”, I saw the problem clearly: we built temples to our own importance instead of workshops for a craft. Journalism did not die because people lost interest in information. It died because it wrapped itself in identity, sealed itself in stone towers, and forgot that the job is not to belong to the club. The job is to go out into the world, find things out, and tell the truth, with or without a school, a badge, or a gothic façade behind you.

If j‑school was the club, the newsroom was supposed to be the gate. That was the story we were told: journalists are the responsible adults who decide what is news, what is noise, and who gets to speak. The editor’s desk was the final checkpoint before anything reached the public. In theory, that’s about standards. In practice, it became about control.

For decades, the gatekeeper model worked because there were literal gates. Printing presses, broadcast licenses, distribution networks, and limited column inches created scarcity. If you wanted to reach thousands or millions of people, you had to go through an editor, a producer, a publisher. They could say no to your story, your community, your angle, and there was nowhere else for you to go. J‑school prepared you to accept that as natural. Learning how to pitch to the gatekeeper was framed as part of the craft.

Of course everything sounded bland and the same: it was called fit and it ensured there were no surprises.

Then the internet took a battering ram to the gates. Suddenly, anyone could publish. Blogs, forums, early online news sites, then social media, YouTube, podcasts, Substack: every wave put more holes in the wall. People who had never been invited inside the newsroom started reporting on their own lives, their own communities, their own governments. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for an editor to validate that what they saw with their own eyes counted as “newsworthy.”

That should have been a wake‑up call. Instead, the profession treated it like a riot. The vocabulary gave it away: “amateurs,” “citizen journalists,” “bloggers in their pajamas.” The assumption was that anything produced outside the gate had to be inferior by definition, no matter how accurate, timely, or relevant it was. The tribe spent more energy defending the wall than asking why so many people were suddenly willing to walk around it.

Once platforms trained audiences to expect direct access, to sources, to documents, to raw video, the old gatekeeping model became a liability. People could compare the polished, filtered version of reality on the evening news with a shaky phone video uploaded five minutes after an event. When there was a mismatch, trust eroded. And because the profession’s identity was built on being the gatekeeper, the instinct was not to self‑correct. It was to double down and blame “misinformation,” “the algorithm,” or “the loss of civility” for the audience drifting away.

The irony is that the best of what journalists are supposed to do, verification, context, pattern‑spotting, is still desperately needed in a world where the gate is gone. But the institutions spent so long teaching their members to be guardians of access that they never trained them to survive in an environment where access is universal. They knew how to open and close the gate. They did not know how to walk out into the crowd and compete on the strength of their work.

That’s how gatekeeping helped kill journalism. The wall that once protected the profession became a psychological prison. When the gate blew open, too many people inside were more offended by the loss of exclusivity than excited by the chance to reinvent the craft. And the audience, already halfway down the road with their own feeds and creators, didn’t stick around to argue about who deserved to hold the keys.