Warner2BruceTD
2011 Poster Of The Year
Depends what you are looking for.
The copy & paste sites will usually give you the news straight from the Observer, but you can never tell when they are adding in their own bullshit. Plus, you never know when they are straight making something up out of thin air.
But if you are just looking for basic WWE & TNA news, those sites are fine and you should probably save your money. Just know they will occasionally feed you blatant bullshit.
The Observer is great if you want super in depth analysis of all things wrestling & MMA. For example, the WWE, quarterly conference call was today, so next week Meltzer will break it all down and do a quarterly business analysis and cut through whatever BS Vince was spewing on the call. You'll get extremely detailed financials, basically the entire P&L broken down. A lot of people don't care about shit like that, I eat it up. I love the business side.
When somebody dies, Meltzer is known for his ridiculously awesome obituaries which are basically mini history lessons.
He will also randomly write other history pieces, like when WWE puts out a new doc DVD, he will break it down and show where they were full of shit.
He does show reviews of all of the TV's and PPV's, with star ratings for the PPV's.
He collects news from every major wrestling & MMA promotion, but his Japanese wrestling coverage has slipped over the years. He used to get tapes and watch all of the TV's, now he just watches the major shows, even though watching the TV's has never been easier.
There is a results section complete with attendance, so you can see whats going on with house shows and how all of the different promotions are drawing.
Plus you get access to the website, with the message board, podcasts, etc. The message board is mostly shit, with people doing gimmicks and trying too hard to get themselves over. That part of the board is very WWE centric and most of the posters don't watch anything else (or even watch wrestling at all in some cases...don't ask). There is one moderated section of the board where you will find most of the indy & puro geeks like me, where you can have real discussion and find links to all of the Japanese & lucha stuff.
There are a ton of radio shows. Meltzer & Bryan Alvarez do three per week, plus breaking news shows as needed. Sometimes they have guests, and often Alvarez will do those on his own. The shows without Meltzer are generally terrible. There is a puro show with Mike Sempervive but I hardly ever listen because I don't like the spoilers, but it's pretty good. I just stick with the shows with Meltzer and the interviews.
Bryan Alvarez has a newsletter on the site (Figure Four Weekly) that is part of the subscription, but I almost never read it. It's less news based and more about reviews. Everything he does Meltzer does better, so it's kind of redundant. Sometimes he'll have a story Meltzer doesn't have, like the absolutely incredible Larry Sweeney obit that he wrote. His show reviews are funny but not funny enough that I read his newsletter consistently.
It's like $10 per month. Try it for one month I guess and see if its worth the money. Now is a good time to jump in, because the Hall of Fame issue is next week (I forgot to mention the Observer Hall of Fame, voted on by wrestlers, ex wrestlers, journalists, historians, etc from all over the world, those issues are just awesome history pieces), and the Observer Awards season is coming up.
