Journalism schools are in the midst of sorting through what it means to prepare journalists for a rapidly transitioning field. In this article, we describe an effort to train students in "social justice journalism" at an elite school of journalism. In our ethnographic analysis of its first iteration, we found that this effort failed to turn social justice journalism into a specialized and teachable form of news production. By exploring the assumptions inherent in the program's first iteration, this article reveals how assumptions that journalism academics and practitioners make about the craft can hurt attempts to teach it.