Where have the real wrestling reporters gone?

I remember when I was a kid back in the ’80s—I used to love pro wrestling, and I couldn’t get enough of it. So when I saw that you could read about wrestling in magazines, I was all over it. Whenever a new Bill Apter mag was released, I’d run to my local convenience store and buy it with my allowance. These mags were full of news and interviews with wrestlers, alongside monthly rankings from multiple promotions I didn’t even know existed—but I didn’t care. I loved every minute of it.

Then Dave Meltzer came into the picture with his newsletter, and things started to change. While I still loved reading those mags—mostly because I knew how much work went into them, and how great of a reporter Bill Apter and the rest of his crew were—they weren’t the cool thing anymore. Meltzer and his Wrestling Observer Newsletter were. Fans who wanted an inside look at what was going on backstage bought into his stuff. That was the invention of the dirt sheet—and the beginning of the downfall of wrestling reporting.

For most of the ’90s, Meltzer was pretty much the only game in town, so it was hard to prove how much of his reporting was made up and how much was real. And without an outlet like the internet, talents couldn’t speak up for themselves or tell fans the whole thing was fabricated. So he got away with a lot in the ’90s, which helped him gain the reputation he has within the business and grow his fanbase.

Then the 2000s arrived, and with that, the internet started becoming a resource for wrestling fans to get news. Yes, I know the internet technically started in the mid-’90s, but let’s face it—most people didn’t really have access until around 2000. With that, wrestling websites started to pop up, giving dirt sheets another way to spread their so-called insider news to the public. And as we all know, a lot of these sites didn’t have real reporters on staff; they just rewrote what had already been written by Meltzer and other dirt sheet writers.

This continued the downward spiral in wrestling reporting that brings us to today. More and more people who followed Meltzer back in the day started copying his style of reporting, and fans bought into it like it was candy. They know that verifying facts would slow them down, and that would hurt their business. Because by now, we all know that everything in wrestling is a business.

I miss the good old days of Apter—his magazines and later his website, which was one of the rare wrestling sites I trusted for news for a long time. I get that times have changed, and the tabloid—or Fox News—style of reporting has taken over doing the actual work of making sure you have the facts before posting a story. But I still hope that someday, wrestling sites will stop posting clickbait and maybe start using material from reporters who actually do the work—and don’t just throw stuff at the wall, hoping something sticks.