Craig Morgan is wrong about who gets to be a journalist

Craig Morgan recently answered a reader question at AZ Hockey Insider about what reporters actually mean when they say they are “hearing” something.

The reader wanted to know where those rumors come from. Agents? General managers? League personnel? Some secret Discord channel populated by insiders who apparently spend their evenings leaking NHL transactions?

Morgan’s answer started well.

Then it wandered into something else entirely.

He explained that responsible reporters shouldn’t take something they heard secondhand and immediately report it as fact. They should pursue the information, verify it with people who actually know what happened, and make sure they can stand behind what they publish.

Okay, great.

That’s called doing your homework.

But Morgan then repeatedly drew a line between the people he considers legitimate journalists and everybody else. To be frank, he sounded like an elitist gatekeeper.

According to Morgan, “reporters who have been trained in journalism and educated in journalism” understand these standards.

Then came “actual trained journalist,” “untrained media member,” and “untrained reporter” labels.

Finally, he got to the part that exposed the philosophy underneath the whole thing:

“We went to school for this.”

And there’s the elite gatekeeping. Suddenly, I had flashbacks to those young personal trainers who went to school for exercise physiology and had been certified trainers since they left high school — yet didn’t have a clue how to excel in the profession.

I was a trainer between 2012 and 2018, and had seen more than my fair share of it. I’m also a former full-time staff writer at FanSided, and I can tell you from experience that the absolute worst (and most arrogant) writers I worked with had degrees in journalism.

That said, “going to school for this” sometimes don’t mean jack.

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Good journalism doesn’t require permission from a journalism school

Morgan’s underlying sourcing argument is perfectly reasonable, and something I’m no stranger to. If somebody tells me an NHL team is relocating because his cousin’s roommate knows somebody who works in the front office, I’m not publishing “BREAKING: TEAM RELOCATION IMMINENT.”

That information is a lead, but now I have to verify it and ask a boatload of critical questions.

• Who knows firsthand?
• Can I get somebody else to corroborate it?
• Is there documentation?
• Does the source actually have access to the information he claims to possess?

Those are excellent questions, but none of them require a journalism degree. They require a brain and common sense.

That’s where Morgan takes a perfectly defensible standard and turns it into gatekeeping credentialism. Knowing how to verify information doesn’t become some mystical ability bestowed upon you after four years inside a journalism program.

Trust me, I’m a university grad myself — another feat that just ain’t very impressive in 2026.

You learn it, practice it, get better at it, and sometimes, despite having a journalism degree, you still screw it up — I would know it because I’ve seen it.

“We went to school for this” proves far less than Craig Morgan wants to think

Morgan compares an untrained person entering journalism to somebody wandering into another profession and immediately assuming he is on equal footing with trained professionals.

But journalism isn’t neurosurgery. If I stroll into an operating room tomorrow and announce that I’ve watched several videos about brain surgery, somebody should probably tackle me before I reach the patient.

The surgeon possesses highly specialized technical knowledge and requires extensive clinical training because one wrong movement can kill someone lying unconscious on a table.

Journalism doesn’t work that way. You gather information, you interview people, evaluate evidence, distinguish what you know from what you suspect, corroborate claims, communicate what you found, and correct yourself when you get something wrong.

Or, you can approach journalism from a fan perspective and base everything on speculation that insiders are hearing. But then again, it’s not too hard to find the insider and verify their quotes.

Those skills can absolutely be taught in journalism school, but they also don’t require an overpriced piece of paper stating that you completed a bunch of classes and received a certain number of credits.

The degree isn’t the method, and it certainly isn’t a credibility certificate. If it were, professionally trained journalists working for major news organizations would never publish garbage.

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The standard matters more than the person carrying the credential

This is where Morgan’s argument should have ended.

A credible reporter verifies information before publishing it, and an irresponsible reporter doesn’t.

Instead, he attaches the behavior to professional identity: Trained journalists supposedly operate according to one set of standards. Untrained media members apparently inhabit something closer to the Wild West, where “all bets are off.”

But imagine reversing the test.

Suppose some guy with no journalism degree independently confirms a story with three people directly involved, obtains documentation supporting it, gives the subject an opportunity to respond, and publishes an accurate report.

Beside him sits a journalism-school graduate who rushes out a poorly sourced story because he wants to beat a competitor by six minutes. This is actually one of many reasons why I went indie — because I was conditioned into the speed, speed, and more speed mentality.

That said, who committed the better journalism?

The answer is obvious, and nobody needs to inspect their diplomas.

The internet broke journalism’s monopoly, not journalism itself

I understand why professional reporters find the modern media environment frustrating — I can also understand why so many of them treat Leftist politics like they’re religious dogmas because the internet expanded something called a market.

Anybody can create an X account, start a Substack, and open YouTube and start telling thousands of people that his buddy’s barber heard Connor McDavid is demanding a trade to Arizona even if Arizona currently has no NHL team.

There’s an enormous amount of BS floating around, but the answer isn’t to pretend professional journalism possesses a credentialed boundary separating the trustworthy from the unwashed masses — especially in today’s wrecked mainstream media landscape.

The internet destroyed that boundary years ago, and that isn’t necessarily a tragedy despite journalists like Morgan clearly pretending otherwise.

For most of modern media history, getting information in front of a large audience required access to printing presses, television networks, radio stations, or established publishers.

Those institutions acted as distribution gatekeepers. Now they don’t, and thank the universe. 

That creates noise, but it also lets independent reporters, subject-matter experts, bloggers, creators, and obsessive beat-watchers to publish useful information without asking an editor at a legacy outlet for permission.

Some will suck, lie, and report rumors they haven’t verified. But others will get better at covering a subject than people carrying journalism degrees.

And you know what makes the free market so beautiful?

It lets people abandon bad actors without requiring a credentialing authority to decide who may participate. Because readers, viewers, and listeners aren’t fond of lapping up inaccurate content. And that’s objectively inaccurate content — not something a so-called indie “fact checker” labels as misinformation, but that’s coming your way in an additional article.

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Journalism should be a method, not a caste system

Morgan says it frustrates trained journalists when people enter media and think they are immediately “on par” with professionals.

Fine. Then outperform them, develop better methods, verify more carefully, write more clearly, build a track record, correct mistakes transparently, and give readers reasons to trust you without trashing competition and putting labels on people.

That’s how credibility should work. The moment journalism starts leaning too heavily on “we went to school for this,” it stops defending standards and starts defending status.

I don’t want unverified garbage flooding my feeds any more than Morgan does. I want reporters distinguishing firsthand information from rumor, corroborating sensitive claims, and protecting sources responsibly rather than letting anonymous nobodies manufacture stories behind them.

Those standards are worth defending, but good standards remain good regardless of who follows them. A journalism graduate who ignores them is practicing bad journalism, and a self-taught reporter who follows them rigorously is practicing good journalism.

The diploma doesn’t change the equation, and this raises another question that Morgan unintentionally opened when he cited organizations such as the Poynter Institute as authorities on what legitimate journalism should look like — yet another reason why I left the mainstream. 

If professional journalists establish their credibility partly by appealing to institutions that define acceptable journalistic standards, who establishes the credibility of those institutions?

That deserves an article of its own, as I implied earlier. Journalism tells the rest of us to question institutions constantly, and we should probably find out whether journalists are willing to do the same when the institution is one of theirs.

A fun lesson in free markets…

What made me cross Morgan’s newsletter in the first place?

I’ve been following potential NHL expansion lately, and have taken a renewed interest in the Arizona Coyotes — a team I very nearly covered at FanSided but because I had overlooked them on the openings back in 2022, I ended up covering the Buffalo Sabres instead before I went full time in January 2024.

But that didn’t stop me from mourning the Yotes, and even going as far as to name the protagonist of a book I’m about to release Yote — Yote Diamondback, to be exact.

Yote, the protagonist in The Arcane Prophecy, a YA academy fantasy, enters a region where the free market and its invisible hand decides which actors stay in the game, and which actors fall by the wayside.

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