Wrestling media has always been a morass, trying to cull reliable news from three-to-four reliable sources amongst the sea of people jumping on rumors and cutting and pasting from the aforementioned rocks of info. Pro wrestling journalism was never really mainstream, because let's face it, the market on covering a staged sport was only going to appeal to the most hardcore of fans. The Wrestling Observer and the Pro Wrestling Torch really pioneered the area of wrestling journalism (and for their efforts, they're lableled as "dirt sheets"), but as they segued onto the Internet, their work became plagiarized by the various CP sites.
Basically for the last ten or so years, that's been the state of wrestling news. Meltzer, Alvarez, Keller and now Powell report it, and everyone else flocks to it. However, a new phenomenon has sprung up... Twitter.
The social networking platform has the potential to revolutionize the way news is broken if it hasn't already. As you can see on the sidebar, the feds themselves, wrestlers and the news sites all have jumped on the Twitter train. Some of them are really inane (Matt Hardy, looking in your direction), some of them are informative (mostly the Sapolsky/DG and ROH ones) and some are used in the way that you or I would use them (Jericho and Chavo for example). Some guys have used it to break some right-from-the-source news, although for the most part that has been the domain of guys who can afford to break news and leak secrets because of the unionized nature of their profession (i.e. other athletes).
While the ever-looming iron fist of Vince McMahon and other promoters will always hang over the heads of potential leaks, that doesn't mean things won't change and people won't get the huevos to start leaking stuff. Could the rise of secret-identitied Twitter accounts be on their way? Workers at the end of their contracts might start dropping hints or items without the fear of repercussion from bosses who can't do anything to them other then job them out on their last few appearances. Or who knows, maybe wrestlers will finally unionize and the guys themselves can be more transparent about what they share with the masses.
Even if the demand for the backstage dirt on wrestling were higher (it really isn't, as if it were, Meltzer would be a household name for anyone who watches wrestling), getting sources to talk and give credible leads will always be a dicey proposition because of that aforementioned Sword of Damocles hanging overhead. However, if you shove enough microphones in enough people's faces, you'll get answers eventually. Twitter acts as a huge sea of microphones for anyone who wants to sign up for it. The number of wrestling personalities on Twitter may be small comparatively speaking for now, but with the tech-savviness of society growing, future wrestlers may start using it and bringing the business into a state of on-demand newsworthiness.
0 comments:
Post a Comment