A Moment of Braggery

In July 2025, I remembered that I had been interviewed for a book.

I don't remember what made me think of it. The interview had happened six months earlier, in January. Guy and I had exchanged a few emails afterward. Somehow, at no point did I think to ask when the book was actually coming out.

So I looked it up.

Beyond Nitro: Untold Stories from the WCW Era by Guy Evans had apparently been published three months earlier… in April 2025.

Whoops.

I immediately bought it on Kindle and did what I assume any reasonable person would do after discovering they might be in a book.

I searched my own name in the book.

I knew Guy had interviewed me. I assumed he'd used some of what we'd talked about.

I did not realize how much.

There I was on the contributor list: Christine Lawrence, former Senior Director of Media Insights and Analytics, WWE.

There I was again in an interlude called “Don’t Touch That Dial.”

And not just a quote.

As I texted Jon a few minutes later, “I’m like the first half of a chapter interlude.”

Then I showed up again later, talking about research I'd done around women's wrestling while working at Spike.

Then I found the acknowledgments.

“Christine Lawrence for being an absolute fountain of knowledge regarding the Nielsen ratings system.”

Obviously, I took a screenshot.

“Me, now an ACKNOWLEDGED AND QUOTED AUTHORITY on how Nielsen ratings work,” I texted Jon.

“So fancy!” he replied.

Then I started sending screenshots to other people.

“Friends: a Moment of braggery incoming.”

I informed them:

“I am now an ACKNOWLEDGED AND QUOTED AUTHORITY on how Nielsen ratings work, especially in the context of WWE vs WCW, in a real actual published book.”

This required braggery.

* * *

Six months earlier, Guy had found me on LinkedIn.

There are a lot of self-proclaimed wrestling media experts out there. Wrestling fans have been arguing about television ratings forever. Wrestling fandom is inherently tribal, and ratings give everyone numbers to argue with.

This wrestler is a draw. That wrestler loses viewers. This company is winning. This company is dying.

Here's a number that proves the thing I already believed.

I used to have to fact-check some of this stuff when I worked at WWE. Dirt sheets.1 Twitter. Sometimes more legitimate publications. I once provided information that resulted in a correction to a Sports Business Journal article.2

The whole thing felt completely insane. We were a company with access to the actual Nielsen data, fact-checking unofficial information because fans would eat it up.

Sometimes I was actually verifying the hard number. More often, the problem was a wrong interpretation, or someone trying to assign meaning where there wasn't any.

People tried to claim causation all the time because it fit their own particular narrative.

The validity of the data was more important to me than the tribalism.

Guy wasn't looking for another wrestling media expert.

He was looking for a Nielsen expert who happened to know wrestling.

There is an extremely small sample of people who fit that bill so exactly.3

3

His message explained that he was writing a book about professional wrestling, including a discussion of the modern television environment and the value of wrestling content. He'd found my LinkedIn profile, and my time at both Nielsen and WWE made me particularly relevant to what he was working on.

Would I be willing to talk?

Absolutely.

It sounded like fun. I wasn't at WWE anymore, so I had more freedom to talk to him than I would have had in the past. I was honestly honored to be asked.

Also, I got to geek out about Nielsen ratings.

I love talking about Nielsen ratings.

I've often said that if I were forced to give a TED Talk on the spot, it would probably be demystifying how Nielsen works.

I did not prepare for my interview with Guy.

I didn't need to.

* * *

We talked by phone on January 7.

Guy wanted to understand ratings methodology, common misconceptions about how ratings are reported, streaming measurement, and the relationship between wrestling viewership and media rights.

One of the things we talked about was “double counting,” particularly the idea that people flipping between Monday Nitro and Monday Night Raw somehow inflated both shows' ratings.

It didn't.

This all comes down to a misunderstanding of what a Nielsen rating actually is. A reported audience isn't simply a count of every unique person who wandered through a show at some point. It's based on the average audience across the program.

There are nuances here.

I could keep going.

I will not.4

When I eventually read my quotes in the book, they sounded exactly like me explaining this stuff.

It's definitely my voice.

The day after our interview, Guy emailed me again.

Samba TV had released a number for the first episode of Raw on Netflix. What did I think?

I'd never worked with Samba data, but I had questions.

What televisions could it measure? Who might that leave out? How representative was the sample? Was it weighted? What did it mean that people opted into the panel?

And what, exactly, did the number represent?

Unique homes? Average homes in an average minute? Something else?

“I hate when metrics aren’t clear!!!” I wrote.

The next day, Netflix numbers came out and Guy and I were emailing about “views” versus “viewers.”

* * *

Then, in March, Guy came back.

This time, he sent me part of the book.

The section dealt with January 4, 1999, one of the most infamous nights in Monday Night Wars history.5 It centered on a ratings movement that wrestling fans have been arguing about ever since.

That night, WCW announcer Tony Schiavone spoiled the result of the competing WWF show, telling viewers that Mick Foley was going to win the WWF Championship.

“Ha,” Schiavone famously added. “That’s gonna put some butts in the seats.”

The quarter-hour numbers subsequently showed roughly 600,000 viewers moving from TNT to USA.

And wrestling fans have been telling a story about those 600,000 viewers ever since: WCW told people Foley was going to win, so hundreds of thousands of people immediately changed the channel to see it.

The numbers showed you that the audience moved.

The numbers alone couldn't tell you why.

Guy had already written the section. He wasn't asking me to construct an argument for him or give him another quote.

He wanted me to check his thinking.

He sent it because, as he put it, I was “a wealth of knowledge on this.”

I read it and told him I didn't think anything was missing. I was glad he'd included another quarter-hour comparison involving Eric Bischoff and David Flair because it showed the slight absurdity of this kind of comparison.

He'd also used the Coase line about torturing data until it confesses.6

I appreciated that.

“I just wanted to get your eyes on it before going any further,” Guy wrote back.

I respect that.

He had an interpretation he thought was right, and before he published it, he wanted someone who understood the data to check it.

I'd trusted him with my expertise.

Now I knew he'd treated it with the same care I would have.

Also, I got a sneak peek at a wrestling book before it came out.

Still cool.

* * *

And then the book came out.

I completely missed it.

Three months later, I was searching my own name on Kindle and discovering just how much of that January conversation had made it into print.

As cliché as it feels to admit it, I've got a sort of bucket list.

One of the items on it was:

Be a published expert.

It always felt like a natural progression someone should want.

And here was a real actual published book calling me an “absolute fountain of knowledge regarding the Nielsen ratings system.”

Apparently that's how I checked Be a published expert off the bucket list.

“Literally bucket list event for me,” I texted a friend.

Also:

“I’m cool af lol.”