When the World Wrestling Federation announced March 23 that it would purchase long-time rival World Championship Wrestling from media megalith AOL Time Warner, in effect creating a national monopoly over professional wrestling programming, Wade Keller was already on to it.

The night before, his sources confirmed that a preliminary deal for the sale had been reached, and the news item was posted on his Pro Wrestling Torch Web site. Major news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and CNN, began reporting on the buy-out only hours before the official announcement.

It's news bigger than any championship tussle or Pay-Per-View pyrotechnics extravaganza, but it's probably no surprise to fans that have been following the deal on any number of wrestling Web sites. They would already have known that the WWF's only competitor in the bid for WCW had dropped out earlier in the week, which cleared the path for the resulting sale.

Multimillion media deals -- especially those that secure control over an entire entertainment genre under one corporation -- make good headline fodder, even when it involves a business as clouded in spin and marketing as pro wrestling. But the fact that the news got out online and reached its intended audience before any public acknowledgement from TV and print is a testament to how much the Internet has changed the industry.

The Web has emerged as one of the most effective mediums to deliver credible information and reportage in the often insular world of professional wrestling -- where truth, fantasy and self-promotion often melt together to create a mythology of larger-than-life characters and storylines, all of which serves the admission-paying fans who ultimately drive the financial bottom line of various promotions.

Just for clarity's sake: Yes, the pro wrestling matches you see on TV are all staged and scripted to fit fantasy storylines dreamed up by the writing staff. It's practically a soap opera; one which incidentially happens to feature grown men grappling and smacking each other in a ring.

And the fans are clicking. While Keller declined to state exact figures, he admits his site 'does millions of page views a month.' News of the WCW sale created a further traffic surge.

'Millions' appears to be an industry-accepted figure. Bob Ryder, owner of 1Wrestling.com, another major independent wrestling news site, generates in excess of 10 million page views a month. The WWF's network of sites -- featuring a combination of wrestling content, video streams and animated sales pitches hawking the latest 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin t-shirt -- generate more than 250 million views a month, according company figures.

THE NEWSLETTER AND THE WEB

Perhaps even more impressive is the audience growth when the Web is compared to the limited readership of wrestling newsletters, which numbered to no more than 10,000 tops nationwide up to the mid-1990s. These homespun ?zines were the only source of insider news now widely available online. Writers with a window into the wrestling business authored monthly and weekly newsletters that attempt to shed light on the shadows behind the glitz and glare of the stage show with various degrees of success.

Many notable wrestling writers and columnists found on the Web today came from self-published newsletters. Keller started the Torch newsletter as a hobby in 1987 while still in high school. He continued to publish through college and was successful enough that he could pursue it full-time after graduating in 1993. The Web site joined his publishing venture in 1999.

Prior to joining 1Wrestling.com as columnist and all-around newshound, Dave Scherer covered the wrestling industry in the early 1990s for the 'Chairshots' newsletter before heading into publishing himself in 1995 with ?The Wrestling Lariat? newsletter, where he served as featured writer, editor and publisher.

?[Newsletters] were the only place you can get legitimate true news about the pro-wrestling business,? Scherer said. ?[Wrestling magazines] tend to work with the wrestling federations and go along with the storylines. ? They?re not exactly Newsweek or Time.?

Then came the World Wide Web.

Before the prefix 'www' had any meaning to the public at large and accessing hypertext documents became as simple as point-and-click, pro wrestling discussion online was limited to a small fan community with specialized know-how in navigating the labyrinth of e-mail lists and Usenet newsgroups such as rec.sports.pro-wrestling. (Although some early forums also sprang up with commercial Internet service providers such as Prodigy.)

Participants in these early days of the Net played fast and loose with postings that range from irreverently funny and tastelessly offensive one-liners, to serious discussions of breaking industry news fed by forum participants with contacts in the industry.

As Web usage gained prominence through the mid-1990s with the introduction of user-friendly browsers, wrestling content migrated online. Type the word 'wrestling' in any search engine and endless lists of related Web sites appear for perusal. In fact, some would argue a correlation exists between the rise of the Web and the late 1990s resurgence of public interest in professional wrestling.

MEDIA NEW AND OLD

?You can trace the rise of wrestling?s popularity with the Internet,? said 1Wrestling.com?s Ryder. ?People come to the Internet to find out what?s happening online. It?s like having free ads for wrestling all over the Internet. It?s one of the most active sources of information.?

Ryder can be considered one of the pioneers of Internet pro wrestling content. A self-professed fan since the 1960s, he pretty much stumbled into the online coverage of his hobby while working for Prodigy during the service?s infancy in 1994.

?I?ve just always been a fan, and I had been working with Prodigy as their travel expert,? he said. ?They sent around a message if anybody wanted to take over their wrestling area, and I took up the offer.?

Through his new position, Ryder organized an online chat event with the WWF, which became one of the first one online interactive events between a major wrestling promotion and its fans. As Prodigy phased out its content areas to convert itself into an Internet service provider, he left the company and started 1Wrestling.com in August 1997, recruiting 'The Wrestling Lariat's' Scherer as daily columnist.

?We initially started with the intention of making it a pay site, where people would have to pay to get into the content-rich area,? Ryder said. ?Then we dropped that and made it a free site. We got more columnists and more coverage than when we started.?

A variety of revenue sources, including ad sales and subscriptions for the print version of the 'Wrestling Lariat' weekly newsletter, support the site.

At first glance, 1Wrestling.com appears rather bland, sporting a basic design and interface (recently burdened by endless pop-up ads). But what the site lacks in looks is made up by its writers? and columnists? ability to continuously sniff out and break important industry stories.

According to Ryder, 1Wrestling was one of the first sites to write about the impending departure of WWF star (and Calgary Sun wrestling columnist) Bret Hart to rival WCW in 1997. Imagine Keith Richards leaving the Rolling Stones to join the Beatles, but not before getting into a row with Mick Jagger. It was a move riddled with industry politics that sent shockwaves through the professional wrestling world.

?Going back to the Survivor Series and the situation that Bret Hart was leaving the WWF for the WCW, we were writing about that at least a week before everybody else,? Ryder said.

Of course, being a reliable source of news is just as important as being first. 'If something happens, we make sure that we cover that from all sides and give fair comment before we put it up,' Ryder said. Drawing a comparison between wrestling and entertainment news sites, he added: 'You have some examples of entertainment sites that deal in news that would stand the test of journalism, and you have sites that trade in rumor.'

This is especially true when reporting in a medium that generates as much raw information as the Web, which often gives way to rumormongers. 'There are people that are reputable, and there are people that aren't,' Scherer said. 'I get my information from first-hand sources and contacts I've made in the industry, I'm on the phone all day.'

Asked if he was worried about competition from the thousands of wrestling-related sites online today, Scherer shrugs, 'I don't really worry about what other people do out there,' he said. 'A lot of the sites out there use our stories, and say Dave Scherer contributed to the story when all they did was take the story from our site. We've got to be doing something right.'

While Ryder and Scherer appeared to have migrated their brand of professional wrestling commentary online to some success, Dave Meltzer, editor and publisher of the 'Wrestling Observer' newsletter and Web site, seems more reserved in his approach to the Internet.

Meltzer started writing about the wrestling business in 1971, and has published his weekly newsletter since 1982 -- a 12 to 18-page booklet of inside scoops and analysis.

The Web site that accompanied his publication began in 1997. At its height, it received an estimated 500,000 unique visitors a month, but that number fell due to lack of updates. 'I just sense that there is the need to constantly feed this monster every five minutes with new information, even when there isn't,' Meltzer said.

The site went though a redesign several months ago, and has assumed daily feature updates. Given the recent interest in the WCW buyout, 'traffic is way up,' he said.

However, Meltzer still embraces the new medium with hesitation. '[The Web site] is only beneficial as a way to expose people to the Observer,' he said.

With about 7,000 subscribers to the Observer newsletter, which runs at $11 for four issues, Meltzer finds the financial rewards of Web publishing fall short when compared to tried-and-true old media. 'I've read a lot of predictions of doom for the newsletter ? but none of them had the circulation that I have. I don't know, it's still by far the most lucrative thing I do,' he said. 'What I can make with a Web site is nowhere near what I can make in the newsletter.'

But the abundance of wrestling news on the Web has not left Meltzer?s weekly print effort unscathed. 'It's changed the newsletter,' he said. 'The Observer used to be where everyone went to get the breaking wrestling news. With that information readily available on the Web, the newsletter is now more an analysis of the story as opposed to being about the story itself. ? It?s forced me to do 18 pages from 12 pages [a week]. It?s forced me to write more detail stories and business analysis.?

Pro Wrestling Torch's Keller shares a similar view with Meltzer; that his wrestling news site serves as a promotion tool to increase the subscription base (20 weekly issues for $36) for the print version. 'The Web site has generated hundreds of new subscribers to the newsletter,' he wrote by e-mail. 'The newsletter has become stronger because of the Web since literally hundreds of thousands of wrestling fans know about us now who didn't before.

'As far as content goes, the 'for the record' type stories that used to take up space in the newsletter are now available on the Web, freeing up space in the newsletter for our strengths, which is insider news and news analysis.'

ENTER THE CORPORATION

Amidst the activity and debate sparked by wrestling writers on the Web, perhaps it is inevitable that corporate media would also throw itself into the fray, using its connections and wealth to push out competition in an attempt to own a potentially lucrative niche. This is especially true for wrestling, with a built-in audience of adolescent and adult males that makes for ideal advertising fodder.

SportsLine became that corporate player when it launched WrestleLine.com in May 1999. The Internet sports content provider that produced Web sites for Major League Baseball and the PGA tour built the online destination with a strategy that includes acquisitions and multimedia partnerships.

?There was a gentlemen here who wanted to start a wrestling site and SportsLine gave him the go-ahead after hearing his pitch,? said Dave Richard, a producer at WrestleLine.com. ?We went and bought Wrestlemaniacs.com [an independent wrestling site] and built the site from there. Our biggest key partnership is with WOW [World of Wrestling] Magazine. We put a lot of their content on the site, and with them, we got [columnist] Steve Anderson. ?

Richard believes that the acquisition route taken by parent company SportsLine ?was the best way to build a site,? because it would already have an existing audience. By retaining Wrestlemanics?s content, which came from reports and columns penned by some of wrestling?s more knowledgeable online pundits and Usenet newsgroup moderators, ?it helps make our site more credible to the Internet audience.?

The alliance with upstart glossy WOW magazine, first published in May 1999, offered similar benefits to the start-up. ?They are a print magazine with its own readership we can refer to our site,? he added. ?So it?s a great way for us to build an audience.?

The efforts of WrestleLine?s 15 staff writers and producers have garnered the site about 3 million page views a week, according to Richard, although the numbers fluctuate based on the seasons. ?In Fall and Winter, we do better because people are indoors more and surf the Web.?

While a browse through WrestleLine?s home page may reveal a thorough survey of the industry?s daily news, breaking original stories has been a challenge, Richard admits. ?We?re consistently trying,? he said. ?That?s one of our biggest weaknesses.?

Richard cited two recent instances when they were breaking coverage. ?When [former WCW star] Scott Hall signed with ECW [Extreme Championship Wrestling, the third-largest promotion in the United States, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 4], we were one of the first ones to report it,? he said. ?When the WWF announced that they were suing the PTC [Parents Television Council], we were ahead of a lot of sites because being with SportsLine, we get the [Associated Press] wire.?

As for quality control, Richard relies on the judgment of his writing staff to determine whether a development is news and to verify sources. ?If our writers say it's news, we trust them,? he said. ?We?re very careful, especially with wrestling. I?ve heard all sorts of funny rumors on the Web.?

WRESTLING WITH THE WEB

The advent of the Internet as a communication medium has had the same effect on wrestling as it had with other once-insular industries; it has brought more transparency to the public and increased the speed by which news is spread. 'It used to be such a close business,' Meltzer recalled. 'The idea of anyone [in the wrestling industry] talking to me was like a horrible thing. Now it's open.'

?It [the Web] made information immediate,? 1Wrestling's Ryder said. ?Instead of waiting one or two weeks, for example, to hear about what happened at a taping in Georgia, you can know immediately. The coverage before was very, very limited. The wrestling companies saw them [journalists] as outsiders who challenged them. They thought they were trying to pull back the curtain on what they?re doing. Now they realize they can use the Internet to promote their events.?

Even the way wrestling fans talk about their favorite spectacle has changed as the Web opened up the industry. Terms which reflect its carnival sideshow roots, such as 'kayfabe (maintaining the myth that wrestling is 'real'),' 'marks (wrestling fans),' baby-faces (the good guys),' and 'heels (villains)' have found their way to the mouths of the casual fan.

?It?s a big-time entertainment event,? Ryder said. ?The more you know about it, the more you?re interested in it.?

On the other hand, Meltzer finds the Web's influence on wrestling negligible. He believes the medium has only changed the wrestling business by providing the audience with yet another voice to affect change. ?If they [the audience] complain loudly enough about something, the industry might hear it,? he said. ?But that?s always been the case anyway.?

As for the notion that the Web has somehow contributed to the current popularity the entertainment form has achieved, Meltzer credits the collection of variables such as the rise of at least two popular main event talents (Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock), coupled with improved production values on wrestling programs and the overall quality of the product with the resurgence.

?The popularity really depends on the cyclical aspect of the business,? Meltzer said. ?I think television drives the business. I don?t think the Web drives the business.?

Although one coverage area Meltzer believes may have benefited from the Web is U.S. access to overseas news. The latest scoops on the professional wrestling outfits in Japan, Mexico and Europe, each with its own unique cultural spin and fandom, has reached a larger audience online.

?The information?s out to more people, but it?s not like there?s no new information before,? Meltzer said. ?For Mexico, it?s helped a little more. Back before it hit a peak in the early ?90s, most of it [news reporting] consisted of Americans going down to Tijuana to see shows, or going to see a big show in Mexico City and writing about it. We still get the same information now, but now it?s all over the Web.?

But better access to international wrestling news may not exactly translate to a surge in interest. ?I don?t know if the interest level is there though,? Meltzer said. ?During the period when the U.S. product isn?t that good, and the Japanese product is that good, the casual American fan is willing to watch something in Japanese or something in Spanish. It?s based on who?s got the most revolutionary product.?

THE FAN AS JOURNALIST

One characteristic that seems to run through almost all wrestling journalists is that on one level or another, they're fans of what they write about. 'Anybody that does this has got to be a fan,' Ryder said. 'It requires the devotion of a fan to do it.'

Is it problematic being so emotionally involved with the subject? ?I never had a problem because I had a journalism background,? Meltzer said. ?If I write about it as a fan, then I?m blowing it. If you write about it as a fan, that bias comes out, so it?s better to write about it as balanced as possible. It?s a tough thing to do. ? I?m not into personality. I?m into issues.?

Even when it comes to more subjective pieces such as match reviews, Meltzer believes that writing with a balanced eye is necessary to maintain editorial integrity and his reputation as a credible source of news. ?If you?re reviewing a show, you?re going to like things and not like things. The trick is to look at what works and doesn?t work,? he added. ?To look at something that doesn?t work and to say that it does work is not doing the right thing. But no one is 100 percent perfect.?

A fan since 1986, WrestleLine's Richard readily admits that he enjoys WCW's product more compared to other U.S. promotions. But he believes his personal feelings cannot get involved into his site's coverage at the risk of alienating the readership. 'If not, every story you put up, you?ll be accused of it [bias],' he said. 'What?s best for the site is if we keep a very impartial view.'

Richard also believes his site has managed to straddle the thin line between genuine coverage and promotion, especially in a business as commercialized as wrestling. 'I think we?re doing a very good job with that,' he added. 'We?re not necessarily doing favors for them [the wrestling promotions]. They?re doing favors for us to get the publicity.'

COMING TO A DESKTOP NEAR YOU...

But a more immediate issue lies beyond issues of news coverage and ethics. With the WWF emerging the owner of a wrestling monopoly due to the WCW purchase, how would coverage be affected, given only one source for news? Will there be enough news to report, and would a shortage of news result in a weeding-out in the number of wrestling sites, leaving fewer outlets of information?

Keller appears optimistic: 'This is an extremely exciting and newsworthy time to be writing about wrestling,' he writes. 'It's major change, and that breeds material to write about. ? Readers [on his site] are going to be all the more interested in where many wrestlers who aren't on TV anymore have gone. In short, there is no fear of there being not enough news to report on.'

In contrast, Meltzer maintains a cautious outlook: 'There will be less news to report because there will be less wrestling inevitably and less television of wrestling. There will be substantial long-term effects of this on everyone, and they probably won't be good, but how bad is something nobody can predict.

'A lot depends upon whether or not the interest level in wrestling among fans picks up or goes down,' he added. 'If it picks up, in some way things may balance out. If interest goes down with only one major company to report on, and I'm tending to believe that will happen, it will affect me.'

Richard's take: 'It should be very interesting to see what happens to the information sources over the next several weeks. With [WWF Entertainment Chairman Vince] McMahon controlling both of the major wrestling organizations in America, he will be able to have his wrestling talent do what he wants when he wants to do it.

'It will be very hard to break any kind of dirt, but that won't mean that the information sources will fall by the wayside. I think the next few weeks, and even months, will be the survival of the fittest for the information sources that work with pro wrestling.'

Scherer's take: 'First, if WCW is run long term [by the WWF] as a separate company, I don't see any problem [of a news shortage]. Even if the WWF chose to fold them, there are still a lot of WWF fans out there. I can see interest declining to a degree possibly, but I don't see it closing everyone down.

'I could see it hurting those who specialize in dirt, or gossip, because the WWF runs a much more professional company and their wrestlers don't tell gossip stories out of school the way that those in the AOL Time Warner-owned WCW did,' he added. 'Since I am not a gossipmonger, I will actually welcome that change to the business.'

Revised April 11, 2001