The Problem With Wrestling Media & Social Media

Finally, The Grevas Report has returned to 25YL Media! If you’ve been with me for years, you know this column has been everywhere. Heartland Wrestling Association’s website. Sports Obsessive. Personal blogs. Hell, a few editions were even posted on PWInsider. But now, my 20-year-old column is back where it truly belongs—on 25YL. Enough with the pleasantries. Let’s get down to business. Today, we’re talking about wrestling media & social media, and boy I cannot wait to see the comment section for this one.

Toxic Twitter

Wrestling fans on Twitter/ X, you know that person. The one who has 30,000 followers because they followed 35,000 people themselves. That person with the blue check they paid for that’s followed by 3 indie stars from 15 years ago that they think somehow legitimatizes them. That person who champions one company and trashes another, all day long, seven days a week and twice on Sunday, and thinks they’re part of the wrestling media. You know that person & they suck worse than a Blindfold Match.

I’m not sure why these people have any influence at all. They’re paying $8 a month to make 17 cents a month from their engagement-farming tweets; tweets so outrageous that you have to comment or even quote-tweet. At the end of the day, they’re just fans with opinions themselves. They aren’t industry experts. They aren’t wrestling media. They aren’t more knowledgeable than you. They’re wrestling fans who think they can make money off making you mad on Twitter.

Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Are we truly ok with some random person angering us into commenting or quote-tweeting so they can make a few coins off of us? I’m not. I’m a big advocate of blocking these types of people. Ultimately, they are trying to turn wrestling fans against each other so they can live out their troll fantasies and receive a payout from Elon Musty that isn’t even enough to buy a day-old gas station hot dog.

Now, I could sit here and name these accounts. Drop some screenshots. Put them on blast. But I don’t want to give them anything else to troll about. I don’t want to legitimize them in any way. My objective here is to encourage people to block these accounts that are anti-WWE or anti-AEW and go to the most ridiculous lengths to badmouth whatever promotion they try to vilify. Wrestling fans don’t need this. They don’t deserve to have trolls try to ruin their social media experience. Social media should be a fun gathering place to discuss what you love. To read breaking news on. Not to have TrollFarm7 go on and on about how EVERYTHING AEW ever does is awful or why WWE is RUINING wrestling by incorporating entertainment too. Guess what? While both major American promotions have their flaws, they’re both also doing a lot of things right and business is hot. Tune out the negativity. Enjoy wrestling. Block the trolls. Now onto another major industry problem, wrestling media.

It’s Not All Bad

There are a lot of problems with wrestling media but before we get into it, let’s talk about media and journalism as a whole. There are differences between media and journalists. Journalists talk to sources and investigate stories. Media is a more all-inclusive term, which also includes podcasters and YouTubers, who are more commenting on wrestling and offering their opinions. Those people are analysts and every industry needs analysts. It’s a good thing that wrestling media is so big right now.

But…and this is a big but….there is a ridiculous amount of lack of qualification in wrestling media right now. Wrestling is both athletic and entertainment. To properly be a wrestling analyst, you need to understand this unique art form. Working in the industry helps. Speaking as someone who spent a decade working in the indies, I learned a lot from working with talent at shows. It was my education. I learned the business from professionals—including major names that you see on TV each week. I understand this business and feel qualified to be a member of wrestling media because I was taught by some of the best in the world.

You can be a qualified member of the wrestling media without having worked in the industry but you better be a scholar. There are 101 flavors of pro wrestling and if you’ve only watched 2 or 3 promotions from the last 10 years, I’m sorry but you aren’t qualified. Wrestling has more than 100 years worth of source material to study and understand. To be qualified, you have to know the industry and its history, its styles, and its variations to the point where you could teach a class on it. Otherwise, why should anyone be listening to you?

Then there are the journalists. In pro wrestling, we do have good journalists. Those who have built up relationships with people in the industry and apply journalistic standards. Fact-checking. Talking to multiple sources. Not promoting a story until it’s been confirmed by more than one person. Then, there are websites and social media accounts that type up 200-word stories and publish them based on other people’s reporting. You know the sites. The ones who always say “Per PWInsider or Per Fightful” and then paraphrase what those sites reported previously. Those sites are garbage and if you read them, shame on you.

PWInsider and Fightful, as well as others,  have paywalls for their content, and for good reason. They work for these stories. They are constantly chasing stories and are putting in the work. They should be paid for the service they are providing wrestling fans. These sites that pay for memberships to the sites putting in the work and then publish stories based on what they paid to find out, should never be read. It’s stealing, plain and simple. Beyond the theft element though, it’s also leading to an increase in factually untrue stories coming out.

These sites that aren’t doing their own reporting don’t care about journalistic integrity and will publish anything they think you will read even if it’s 100% incorrect. They don’t care. They will tell you that AEW signed this new billion-dollar deal with WarnerMedia over the summer—which wasn’t even close to true and led to all kinds of social media discussions. They will tell you anything to get you to click, which makes them just as bad as those troll accounts on Twitter I talked about blocking. Those sites are abusing your love of wrestling and hurting the industry as a whole. We need to stop reading them. Give Fightful $5 a month or join PWInsider’s Elite section and if you can’t afford it, read the free version of their sites. It’s what’s best for business.

The last thing I want to say about wrestling media is regarding standards. Both WWE and AEW are now inviting journalists and other members of the wrestling media to post-show press conferences. This is a huge step forward and one that we need to handle well. Asking fluff questions designed to get you invited back to the next media scrum makes all of wrestling media look bad. We look amateur and frankly, like marks. If you’re a member of the wrestling media, act like a member of the media. None of what we see on screen is real life. It’s a story and one that members of the media are supposed to understand. Act like it. Act like you’re actually a reporter and a professional. You don’t see NFL coaches or NBA coaches getting tossed softballs by fans. You see real journalists asking questions that matter. Pro wrestling is offering the media a golden opportunity. Let’s make the most of it.

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