WWE hired several new writers for the creative team earlier this month, according to PWInsider. Michael James Nelson, who has worked on NBC’s Off Their Rocker with Betty White, and on the MTV Movie & TV Awards, was recently hired. Andrea Kail, who worked on TruTV’s Comedy Knockout, was also hired to work on the writing team.
WWE continues to add to the writing team after recent additions including WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett, Bruce Prichard and Dana Warrior.
Regarding the WWE live events division, WWE Hall of Famer Michael Hayes continue to oversee the live events. Steve Corino has been working on the creative side of the live event team in recent months, since coming up from working behind-the-scenes in WWE NXT and the developmental system.
WWE also recently hired two live events managers in Stefanie Stephens and Jules Rice, according to PWI. Stephens previously worked as a market manager for Cirque du Soliel and worked for Cricket Wireless. She will be working on WWE live events in the Southeast. Rice previously worked as a marketing manager for the Houston Sports Authority. She will oversee WWE live events in the Midwest.
Vince McMahon spoke about hiring new additions to the live event and creative teams during his opening statement on the WWE 2019 Q1 earnings call last week. WWE later blamed lower merchandise sales at live events on the decline in live event attendance, but they hope these new hires will help bring that business back up. You can read Vince’s full opening statement with the comments on the teams below (H/T to Fool.com for the transcript.)
“Good morning, everyone. I’d like to address a number of things today, obviously not to belabor the point in terms of our targeted financial results rather in this quarter. And that WrestleMania was spectacular, et cetera, we did record breaking crowd in New York and Royal Rumble was great, we have these big events that seemed to do extremely well. Aside from that, we are doing some documentaries, we haven’t done before on A&E, so we’re broadening tremendously that scope of our business, we’ve got studio shows coming up on FS1, we’ve got talent — reality shows are doing very well, but notwithstanding all of that really, when you look at a quarter and I mentioned this last time on the first quarter, I think going into — or fourth quarter in to first quarter, we had a very unusual situation in terms of talents — top talents as well as mid-card talent to being out, some 15 talent of course in that period. When you have talent, you don’t have story lines, you don’t have story lines, you’re not going to do that well in terms of live events, in terms of television ratings, it was like a cascade of things that happened. I’m happy to say, we have all of those challenges. Back in addition to that, we have new challenges coming in.
And during that period of time, when top talent was out, we made new talent so — and just to belabor the point in terms of where we are with the quarter, but the future and when you look at that and I’m not trying to pull the future for you guys, except to tell you what it’s going to be like, there is, we’ve hired new people in writing team that are really going to help us out in terms of television ratings and digital, social, all that sort of stuff, we’ve got a new team in terms of live events that have just started now. So we’ll see the live events is going to continue on an upward trend.
In coming latter part of September, we’re going to have, it’s almost like, it’s not quite a metamorphosis, but we’re going to have a whole new beginning, we’re going — the promotional value alone notwithstanding rights fees and what have you, promotional value alone in terms of Fox, in terms of commitments from NBCU is something we’ve never seen before, not even close, it’s extraordinary. And at the call the kick-off, I suppose and it’s going to kick us into again an element we’ve never seen before in terms of promotion with everything, WWE talent, story lines, you name it, so it’s a rising tide situation that we’re really looking forward to and having that carry on throughout the year. And that’s about it.”
