At 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, 1968, a coal mine exploded near Farmington, W. Va. Miners and emergency workers rushed to help potential victims and local reporters rushed to cover the disaster. Wendell Cochran, a senior at West Virginia University 30 miles away, was one of those reporters.
“It was a beautiful mid-November afternoon, with long shadows on the hillsides, contrasted by smoke billowing out of the mine shaft,” said Cochran. “I asked the company official, ‘Where is the fire compared to where we are?’ He pointed straight down. It was a sobering realization that then miners were dying.”
In the end, 78 miners died, ranking the explosion in the top five worst coal mine disasters since 1940. As Cochran reported the story alongside the national press, something poignant occurred to the then-journalism student: “I was doing what they were doing,” said Cochran. “I was young and I was just starting to understand the effects of our work on people.”
From this experience, Cochran learned that in the news business, big stories are not always happy events, but he also learned that journalism was a vital profession that he wanted to pursue. Thus, he spent the next 25 years as a reporter.
“Journalism is the most important thing that happens in a democracy,” said Cochran, who considers himself a shameless romantic in regard to the profession. His passion for journalism eventually translated into teaching the subject. He has been a professor in the School of Communication at American University since 1992, serving as the division director from 2001 to 2008. After nearly 17 years of working at American University, Cochran said he loves everything about the campus community. In fact, he loves it so much he has made it his home since the fall of 2007.
Along with his wife, Faye, Cochran lives in Nebraska Hall, the newest student resident hall for upper classmen, on the north side of campus. As the faculty-in-residence, he lives on the terrace, in an apartment-style dorm suite, not unlike that of the 130 students in the building.
“I like the idea of students and faculty living together,” said Cochran. He said students may be hesitant about living next door to a professor, but he enjoys the everyday interactions. He often sits in the terrace lounge and has conversations with students who pass through. He has also hosted several events for the hall, including an inauguration-watch party for the swearing in of Barack Obama.
“He wants to be part of the university community at all times,” said Jimm Phillips, a former student of Cochran’s and now the editor of The Eagle, the campus newspaper. He has taken journalism ethics and multimedia design and production with Cochran and says that while he’s a tough professor, “he challenges you to do better; to go above and beyond.”
Cochran maintains the belief that there’s “no such thing as a perfect story,” which is one of the reasons he doesn’t particularly enjoy grading. “It’s the notion that we would essentially assign values to people,” he said. “I’d much rather coach and work with people rather than give ‘gotcha’ tests and quizzes.”
Besides the three upper-level communication classes Cochran presently teaches, his journalism interests extend beyond the classroom and into the fast-paced, changing world of reporting. As of the spring of 2008, he is the senior editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. As part of the School of Communication, the Workshop conducts research on national and international journalism projects, to create models of greater supervision of government and other private institutions.
After recently retiring from the position of journalism division chair, Cochran has been able to become a real leader in this new and critical field of investigative journalism, according to Amy Eisman, a colleague of Cochran’s. Additionally, he regularly researches the administration of the Freedom of Information Act.
“All of those are titles and jobs,” says Eisman, of Cochran’s various positions and accomplishments. “He’s just as passionate about taking pictures of flowers.”
In his free time, Cochran enjoys photography, and is an avid reader. In addition to his daily dose of The New York Times and The Washington Post, Cochran admits that for pleasure, he reads “trashy crime and spy novels,” and currently has two or three of them started. He enjoys reading Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, in addition to non-fiction works. This passion for reading is strongly rooted in his childhood.
“I come from a family where reading and getting access to information has always been important, so it probably wasn’t that surprising that I ended up doing things with words,” said Cochran.
In the 1930s, his grandmother ran a mule-back bookmobile in the hills of eastern Kentucky. His mother continued this tradition by establishing a bookmobile in West Virginia, where Cochran grew up.
Cochran says that his passionate reading habit is simply part of the nature of all journalists. “It’s how we sustain ourselves. It’s how we get information,” he said. “If we’re trying to be critical and we’re trying to learn, we’re trying to deconstruct what the writer or reporter was trying to do so we can see the structure behind it.”
Eisman, who was hired by Cochran in 2002 to teach in the School of Communication, describes him as a “hardworking kid from West Virginia with all the ethics that go with that.” While Cochran admits he’s been extremely lucky in his career, he says he has faced intellectual challenges along the way.
As a leader in the recent field of computer-assisted reporting, Cochran has been working to develop new strategies and innovations in a technologically advancing world. He teaches a class on the subject, but says that no one was teaching that when he was in school.
“He’s been there as the field has evolved,” said Tony Romm, another of Cochran’s students and a senior journalism major. Romm said that because Cochran can apply his outside knowledge to what he’s teaching, it “colors the entire experience” and gives insight into where the field of journalism is going.
Cochran faced challenges in his early career that many young journalists face. While writing for his college newspaper, Cochran made an error in a front-page story, which he says “made my professor completely unhappy.” He often covered complex subjects such as business and banking. “I had virtually no training or education to cover [those topics],” said Cochran.
Cochran doesn’t remember the first story he wrote, but he still has his first byline, and keeps it on a shelf in his office. He stands firm in his belief that journalism is still an essential field despite widespread predictions of doom for the profession. He tries to instill his students with that same vigor.
“He really believes that people should be hungry for the truth and they should work hard for what they get,” said Eisman. “He gets very upset when people aren’t as enthusiastic as he is about rooting up corruption and getting to the fire of things.”
To those who don’t know him well, he may seem tough, but according to Eisman, “He’s a curmudgeon on the outside, and a marshmallow on the inside.”
In her first week, she remembers asking him, “How do you do this whole teaching thing?” He gave her the best advice anyone could have given her: “‘You are the queen of the classroom. Once you’re in there, it’s totally up to you,’” she said. She found his words to be empowering and often passes it on to other newly hired professors.
Cochran is able to similarly inspire students to realize that careers in journalism are “immensely important,” despite the challenges they may face. In today’s world, there is more information than ever, and a certain level of complexity that was either not present or overlooked when Cochran entered the field.
“As our world has gotten more interconnected and as our problems have grown, it’s clear to us that solutions to problems can’t be one-sided,” said Cochran. “For journalists, trying to explain a more complex world makes it a harder job, but it also makes it a more important job.”
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