User:CWSensation/411mania

411mania is a pop culture and entertainment news website founded and run by Ashish Pabari. The website is dedicated to news, gossip and opinion columns relating to film, music, professional wrestling, mixed martial arts, video games and politics and combines news stories, columns and reviews for its content.

411mania.com receives 15-20 million hits a month, and has been mentioned in The Boston Globe, the New York Times and CNN as well as being cited as a news source by WWE.com , Yahoo Sports , Variety and other media outlets.

History
411mania.com was founded by Ashish Pabari in 1996 as 411wrestling. The site began as a webhosted site on Geocities and as interest in professional wrestling grew with the Monday Night Wars between the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling, the site's readership grew. As it did, the site moved servers and eventually settled in its own domain.

411wrestling shifted their core focus in 2002, expanding from just professional wrestling to include sections for video games and action figures, and then later movies, music, comics and politics. The site re-launched in 2003 as 411mania, with editor Jonathan Widro was promoted to managing partner. Widro departed the site in 2004 with several other writers to found another site, resulting in a change of site organization. The site had a sports section as well, which shifted to focus purely on boxing in March of 2009. The boxing zone was shut down in January of 2011 while the politics section was shut down in March of 2013.

In September of 2014 411mania launched a new site design, updating to a Wordpress format.

Organization
411mania.com is organized into different sections (or "zones") depending on the facet of pop culture covered. The current zones as of October 2011 are:


 * Movies/TV - Covering film, television and entertainment gossip. Includes news, gossip, film and home video reviews, news reports and opinion columns.
 * Music - Covering popular music with a focus on pop music, rock and rap/hip-hop. Includes news, gossip, album reviews, concert reports, news reports and opinion columns.
 * Wrestling - Covering professional wrestling with coverage of WWE, TNA and independent promotions. Includes news, live show reports, news reports, opinion columns and DVD reviews.
 * Games - Covering video games and entertainment technology across multiple platforms. Includes news, game reviews, news reports and opinion columns.
 * MMA - Covering mixed martial arts including Ultimate Fighting Championship, Strikeforce, Bellator and independent promotions. Includes news, show reports, DVD reviews and opinion columns.

Notable writers

 * Former writer Scott Keith is a published author, with five published books on professional wrestling.
 * Former reporter George Sirois is a published author, having independently published the novels From Parts Unknown and Excelsior.
 * Independent professional wrestler Terra Calaway is a former columnist for the Wrestling Zone.
 * Former Wizard Magazine writer Ben Morse wrote as a contributor for the Comics Zone until the zone's closure in 2004.
 * Former Wrestling Zone contributor Scott Fowler is a professional wrestler who has worked matches for WWE and TNA.
 * Wrestling and Movie Zone contributor Shawn Lealos is a contributing writer for Yahoo and Examiner.com.
 * Wrestling contributor Greg DeMarco worked as a promoter, announcer and on-stage character for Arizona independent promotions Impact Zone Wrestling and Rising Phoenix Wrestling.