Stephanie McMahon speaks about unifying creative teams

[Lockard23]

Sorry if someone already posted this.

Stephanie McMahon, the daughter of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, has been in the family business since high school, when she worked the company switchboard. But her training started a lot earlier, when as a child she sat in on her dad's creative meetings "pretending to be not listening, but I was. It's just really what I've always wanted to do." She began leading the WWE's creative writing team at age 22 and was promoted to her current title in 2007, where she oversees the development of TV, pay-per-view, print, digital and social-media programming.

A couple years ago, she merged the creative teams, which had been split by channel. "We are all telling the same stories. And digital and social offer the ability to continue storylines 24/7 so our fans can consume the content anytime, anywhere on the device they prefer." Her influence will soon grow if the WWE, as planned, launches its own network.

Did you know? Ms. McMahon, who is married to wrestling star Triple H, used to appear in WWE programming, just like her dad. But "it just got to be too much," she said, as she began having children (she now has three kids).


http://adage.com/article/news/ad-age...39173/#McMahon

 

[GameOver]

THis isn't news in the respect of RAW and Smackdown telling the same stories, thats one thing that really bugged me for ages, Smackdown was using the same storykines as RAW with the only difference being the talent involved. So if RAW had a triple threat match, amazingly so did Smackdown, but then i guess thats just like watching soap opera's and the like on competing channels, they use the same storylines with just different cast. and at the end of each season there's usually a death or a massive disaster or something.

 

[Wald]

It shows when you look at Smackdown as that show comes off as an afterthought, which often works for the best as the match quality can be superior.

Stephanie has been an abject failure as head of creative though. Look at the talent in the WWE roster today and realise that they have only been able to get create 10 new main event stars in 10 years by my count, and I include Eddie Guerrero & Edge in that list as well as Punk & Bryan, all 4 of those pretty much got themselves over with their talent rather than creative doing it for them.

(Lesnar, Eddie, Punk, Bryan, Batista, Edge, Orton, Cena, Jeff Hardy, Rey Mysterio & Sheamus, although I'm probably forgetting someone)

Even with that list, Rey, Edge, Hardy & Eddie were all stars by the time Stephanie took over booking as well

 

[akathelaw]

My thoughts on the merge:

Smackdown usually had a better flow compared to Raw, at least from around '07 onward. Storylines went on longer, there were logical character transitions and more focus on in-ring action. Over the past few years, Smackdown has given us Jeff Hardy's WWE Title Run, heel Batista, CM Punk's Straight Edge Society (which went over far better than Punk's Nexus angle on Raw), Edge, and don't forget Undertaker's home brand for years. If anything, Raw is cleaning up by having these minds working on the A show.