At the start of 2024, Mr. Ruff retired after years of supervising WCHS Channel 4 and Yearbook Committees. As Mr. Ruff left, a familiar face from just a room away took the role of the Media manager; Mr. Cooley. I decided to interview him and ask him questions related mainly to Channel 4.
The main takeaway from this interview is that Mr. Cooley cares about legacy and tradition. Cooley has shown that he holds a great honor for Mr. Ruff and how he ran Channel 4 for all these years. However, he wants to take the programs to the next level and expand them even further without losing the charm instilled in them. Specifically, he wants to bring professionalism and further quality into Media and Yearbook because of their high status and exposure.
Mr. Cooley is, without a doubt, the next step on how to push for the best Channel 4 one media manager can create. He strives to lay down the ground level and grow to complete the media mission of informing, investigating, entertaining, and including. To provide a wider scope of his goals and views, I sat down during HIVE and asked him important questions.
1. What did you think of the previous year’s channel 4? Such as the quality of it and how it was run?
So the previous year, I loved Mr. Ruff. He’s been my long-time mentor and as a teacher. I’ve known him for about 20 years now. I think overall he took the program to a level that I wanted it to go. The way it was run introduced a high level of professionalism and a good structure for his class. Bringing a lot of good CTE concepts like employability, he established responsibility and assigned producers leading a team of people. Just a higher standard of content, with that being said, a part of his style was giving a lot of student ownership. So there were more student-led programs and producers have a lot of power over content and channel 4s. Granted with a teacher supervising that, though that being said, some segments were probably, in terms of creative style, wasn’t quite appropriate for the audience that we have. Channel 4 is a very public-facing thing so the whole community can watch it. So we’re not just catering to the students but catering to the community, it’s very public. So I think understanding that audience- Some students, some segments probably should not have made it to air. Nonetheless, it’s giving them a creative voice and I appreciate that, so that’s kind of a different story.
2. Do you plan on replicating the success of the previous year, or do you want to go for something new?
I definitely am trying to carry forward Mr. Ruff’s structure. Very much wanted channel 4, for media, to be that to be like that with your producers with your small groups. Everyone is buying into what needs to be done to build a good quality segment. Mr Ruff did a good job trying to create that environment. Regardless of the creative style people understood what needed to be done to do a good job. But I am bringing a lot more industry experience into this because I’ve worked in the field and taught it for quite a while, so I know what it’s like on set. I know what it’s like in a production office. I am bringing a lot of that employability and those high standards, and I hope to bring it to the next level.
3. Do you plan on adding new aspects to the Channel 4 Formula?
“Nothing is perfect and we always grow, that’s what I tell my students. Even if you think you did a good job and you probably did a good job there’s always room to grow, even for me. I still make videos and I still try to do stuff with my own creative projects. I’m always learning so my overall goal for media, at any level, is to let the students keep growing in their skills. So I’m trying to design media skill projects for them that they can pick and choose to decide how they want to grow. So if they want to do more advanced editing techniques, if that’s their interest, I want to have a project for them to work on. Same with cameras, lighting, audio, every aspect of filmmaking or video production. There’s so much room where they can grow. There’s no limit there.”
4. What’s the plan for the future of Channel 4? How do you plan on improving from the last Channel 4?
“Well, the first one is always tough because there’s a shorter time to produce it and people haven’t touched the cameras or edited in a few months. So my goal for the first one is to go back to basics, we have a mission. There are four pillars: Informing, Entertaining, Investigating, and Including. The history, even while I was a student here and for the past 20 to 30 years people love the skits they want to do Saturday Night Live or tik-toky kind of videos. To me, that has to be earned and to earn the right to explore and think outside the box into a pure skit kind of thing. You got to prove that you know the basics and can produce high-quality segments so for that first round I wanted people to focus on the other aspects of the mission (Inform, Investigate, Include). We are like Digital Journalism, we are a broadcast journalist class. People think when they come in “We’re just going to make YouTube videos, we’re just going to make TikTok videos be goofy, have fun” which yeah I want you all to have fun, everything should be entertaining. That to me, that’s the hard part is taking an informative piece about the new high school parking lot. Which is very relevant and stuff we have to learn and it’s very important information and that’s the challenge, making it entertaining. So that first channel 4 was very much back to basics like ‘let’s just get good quality segments, don’t worry about the entertaining aspects, and let’s make this a solid channel 4.’ Now that being said there are some flaws: audio, lighting, camera failures. But I was really pleased with the concepts behind those segments and making a solid channel 4.”
This article is to show respect for Mr. Cooley and to thank him for his time in letting me talk about Media and Yearbook. If you want to thank Mr. Cooley like I am now, then provide feedback to Channel 4 after every show. It seriously helps out all classes of media no matter if it’s positive or constructive criticism.
