Cathy Kelley Talks Her First Year With WWE Being Difficult, Enjoying Where Her Career Is Now
WWE, like most organizations, have adapted well to the social digital boom. Taking part in their journey into the ever growing digital content world is WWE's backstage and social media correspondent Cathy Kelley. Between her cooking shows with WWE superstars and social media posts, Kelley was recently interviewed on the NotSam Podcast with Sam Roberts where she discussed her role in WWE.
"I am traveling a lot more, which is what I wanted," Kelley said. "Doing a lot more digital stuff, with more leeway. Doing more long-form interviews, that is my passion. I feel like everything has been growing and getting better. I made a joke to my boss the other day that when I started, WWE's YouTube page was around 8 million, and now it is at 43 million, so there's only one thing that has changed."
With the gradual spike in content, Kelley made it known that creating content has left a large impact on the WWE office. Despite WWE's already massive pallet of content, Kelley admitted she continues to pitch numerous additional ideas. Kelley's outlook remains positive about what WWE and the WWE Network are able to accomplish as viewer consumption grows.
"The first year was really hard and difficult to navigate for me," Kelley said. "Being in WWE and now I am happy at a place career-wise and am at happy place personally, so I feel like it all came together, which is the best place to create content when you are happy and excited to do things. They probably get a little annoyed by me with all the things that I pitch. I think a lot of the things will happen eventually.
"The whole digital brand has grown so much, especially in the three years that I have been there. They don't even have enough space in their office now. It's such a good problem to have, with all the original shows, a lot of the projects that they have built out have been so good and successful that they have been putting them on the Network as well. We have gotten so many views where we are able to go out and create more projects because of the money that is coming in. There are more editors and producers and everyone else under the digital umbrella and I think it is only growing"
As the technological spectrum has shifted over the years, Kelley's passion for her digital duties, specifically interviewing, has remained as strong as the content itself. Kelley stressed her passion for longer formatted interviews with WWE superstars. She specifically mentioned the challenges and successes of WWE's content, specifically the live interviews with Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch and the Roundtable series.
"I love doing the long-form interviews," Kelley said. "Before the big four Pay Per Views we have been building out that entire week, the week before and creating content. A lot of that is long-form, sit-down interviews. We did one with Becky Lynch that was live, and we did one with Seth Rollins. They are 45 minutes, not cut. The hurdle to get these off the ground was so much of the analytics where people are only watching YouTube for 90 seconds and to have something like that that is 45 minute long interviews, or some of the roundtables that went over an hour for the fans and those that are tuning in for its entirety is really cool."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit the NotSam Podcast with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
Peter Bahi contributed to this article.