Thread by @improvmookie

The business model for all journalism and news organizations has been challenged enormously throughout the evolution from newspapers to digital press and citizen reporters.

Wrestling media has always struggled to find their niche - we live in an era where the clickbait headline or tabloid salacious tactics are regularly adopted because it appears to be one of the few financial models that generates enough traffic to fund the projects.

I can’t say wrestling is better or worse than sports journalism or even political/court journalism when it comes to conflicts of interest and “access journalism”.

Being in the cross section of the entertainment and sports press results in plenty of grey which is regularly exploited by the promotions and performers for good & bad reasons.

There’s questions about whether these sites are giving the fans what they want and if not, what do they want and how do they want to pay for it.

It’s a relic of a begone era that we still have newsletter subscriptions and even famous reporters (such as Meltzer, Keller, apter) but in other ways the podcast revolution was adopted quite early by wrestling writers and analysts.

I always struggled with the term journalist because I think very few would understand journalism ethics or even studied journalism but there’s a lot of accomplished people who do a good job at certain aspects.

News is funded through ads, through public campaigns or benevolent trust, subscriptions model and being aggregators of individuals works.

So far most of the successful and long lasting sites have used a combination of the ad/aggregator model (recapping what others report) or subscription (patreons or newsletters/podcasts).

Interesting how wrestling reporting has always spent a lot of their margin space just recapping what happened and reviewing it like it was crafted entertainment more like a movie or tv show even though it’s presented in a sports-like environment with live crowd. Music concert?