Denise Salcedo

Denise Salcedo is one of pro wrestling media’s most recognizable interviewers — a Los Angeles reporter whose backstage conversations with the biggest stars in WWE, AEW and the independents have made her a fixture of fight-week and premium-live-event coverage. Her Instinct Culture channel archives hundreds of interviews and nearly 900 podcast episodes, building a body of work that functions as an oral history of the modern wrestling era. She co-hosted with WWE Hall of Famer Sean Waltman, appears regularly on WWE programming, and has worked the backstage beat for Ring of Honor. The interview is the art form — and Denise Salcedo has turned it into a career.

She built it herself, from a bed in Los Angeles. Salcedo studied broadcast journalism in college but rejected the industry’s prescribed path — the small-market grind, the move away from home — and looked instead at the world she actually wanted to cover. She grew up a wrestling fan, but when she scanned WWE’s on-air ranks, she did not see anyone who looked like her. Rather than wait for permission, she sat down one evening and, within a couple of hours, had an idea, a name, and a website. That was the birth of Instinct Culture in March 2018 — a hybrid brand covering pop culture and pro wrestling, built on a simple belief: our instincts lead us to our fandoms.

The grind was total. Salcedo wrote constantly — reviews, news stories, original pieces — and then started making videos: red carpets, press junkets, live events. Within a year and 300+ videos, she had passed 10,000 subscribers and a million views, doing everything herself: creative, writing, shooting, hosting, editing, publishing, promoting. Along the way she paid dues across entertainment media, covering events and conducting interviews for J-14, What’s Trending, Red Carpet Report TV, The Trendy, and others, emceeing for brands like Target, Disney, Amazon, and Xbox, and ring announcing for independent wrestling promotions across Southern California.

The wrestling world noticed. Salcedo began co-hosting the X-Pac 12360 podcast with WWE Hall of Famer Sean Waltman, recapping Raw weekly on Fightful alongside Sean Ross Sapp, and eventually became a full-time personality for F4W Online — hosting three episodes a week of her Speak Now Pro Wrestling podcast plus producing daily news videos under the banner The Latest. Her own Instinct Culture podcast, expanded from the YouTube channel, now runs nearly 900 episodes dating to July 2020, with Denise live multiple times a week covering Raw on Mondays, NXT on Tuesdays, Dynamite on Wednesdays, SmackDown on Fridays, and every premium live event — a Listen Score in the global top one percent of podcasts.

The numbers tell the growth story: her YouTube channel (@denisesalcedo, established January 2015) has grown past 223,000 subscribers with more than 3,200 videos and 117 million total views, featuring sit-downs with CM Punk, Rhea Ripley, Becky Lynch, John Cena, The Rock, and a generation of wrestling’s biggest names. That archive is the real asset — hundreds of long-form conversations that capture wrestlers in their own words, at every stage of their careers. Few interviewers in the business have a deeper bench.

WWE itself has come calling, repeatedly. Salcedo’s on-air résumé includes the 2019 Hell in a Cell WatchAlong, the 2021 Elimination Chamber WatchAlong, appearances on WWE Evil and The Great Debate on Peacock, the 2021 NXT WarGames pre-show, and a guest co-hosting spot on the NXT Deadline kickoff show in December 2022 alongside Sam Roberts and McKenzie Mitchell. Beyond WWE, she debuted as Ring of Honor’s backstage interviewer at Supercard of Honor XV in April 2022, took her legendary turn in the 2022 GCW Clusterfuck battle royal, ring announces for Game Changer Wrestling on the West Coast, and calls commentary for Mission Pro Wrestling.

What separates Salcedo is the engine behind the smile. The energetic, bubbly on-camera presence is real, but it sits on top of a one-woman production company: she has produced every frame of her rise. In a media landscape where wrestling coverage skews heavily toward hot takes and rumor aggregation, her lane — the direct conversation, the prepared question, the genuine fan’s curiosity — feels increasingly rare and valuable. Wrestlers open up to her because she does the work: she knows the storylines, she knows the history, and she lets the subject be the star.

She is still expanding. A live stage show in Las Vegas extends the brand beyond the screen, and the Instinct Culture operation keeps growing — daily content across WWE and AEW, interviews with the sport’s biggest names, and a community that shows up for every stream. Denise Salcedo did not wait for wrestling media to make room for her. She built her own room, decorated it herself, and invited everybody in — and now the biggest companies in the business come to her door. For fans, the promise is simple: wherever wrestling’s biggest stories break, Denise Salcedo will be there first — mic in hand, questions ready, and a decade of hustle behind every interview.