Lainey Lui: Canada’s gossip magnate
By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - 0 Comments
A vital player in the new Hollywood hype machine, Lui is building an empire out of ‘smut’
CTV
On Feb. 24, the day the entertainment complex gathers for the lucrative popularity contest known as the Academy Awards, Elaine Lui will wake in her Los Angeles hotel room before 6 a.m. For Lui, who produces Canada’s pre-eminent celebrity gossip website, laineygossip.com, this is a big game day or, as she puts it, “the Super Bowl of gossip.” As an on-air correspondent for CTV’s eTalk, Lui is also part of the spectacle, providing red carpet play-by-play. She’ll then hoof it backstage to the press room to blog to her fellow “smuthounds” and tweet to her 66,615 followers. One year, she shared a tale of how Sean Penn blew cigarette smoke in her face.
Once the broadcast wraps, Lui’s real work begins: she returns to her hotel, where she and TV writer Duana Taha, a laineygossip.com contributor, will spend the next 12 hours posting—“best” and “worst” fashion, big moments, bad behaviour—with the mix of opinionated snark and fan-girl gush for which the site is known. Lui produces between 2,000 and 4,500 words a day, five days a week, on everything from Tilda Swinton’s bad-ass style to Lindsay Lohan’s bad behaviour. On Oscar night, they churn out more than 10,000 words. “We want posts ready for readers in the U.K. when they wake,” says Lui, sitting in a Toronto hotel bar in February. “Readers expect it.”
Such devotion and hard work explains, in part, how the 39-year-old Vancouver resident has carved out a niche in the crowded celebrity-gossip sphere—a gridlock that spans Yahoo’s OMG! with 28.5 million visitors a month to conglomerates such as Disney, which use subsidiaries such as ABC to plug its movies. (Similar synergies have helped Lui: when she broke the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes split last year, the Globe and Mail, which shares a corporate parent with eTalk, covered the breakup and interviewed her about the scoop.) Over the last three months, laineygossip.com had five million visits and more than 20 million page views, but her influence is even more significant. Google “celebrity gossip” and 64 million results pop up: laineygossip.com is No. 5.
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What the gossip columnist saw
By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 3 Comments
Some names in Shinan Govani’s new novel are real, some aren’t. That’s why it’s fun.
During the 90 minutes I spend with Shinan Govani, Canada’s most celebrated gossip columnist, Victoria Beckham is being touted as the new Paula Abdul on American Idol, rumours are swirling about a pregnant Halle Berry, and Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald have spoken about John Hughes’s death. One sentence into this piece and I’ve managed to name-drop six celebrities. But I can’t hold a candle to Govani, whose first novel, Bold Face Names, is being released this month. By page 10, Govani has dropped the names of 66 famous people or star-studded events, including Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant, Jimmy Choo, Susan Boyle, Suri Cruise and even David Frum.“How many names do you think you mentioned in the book?” I ask. “I haven’t counted,” he laughs. Govani’s main character is a gossip columnist named Ravi. “His trade is to drop names. To make it as absurd as possible, whenever he has the opportunity to drop names, he will.” Some names are real, some aren’t. “There are real people with their real names,” Govani explains. “There are real people with false names and there are just made-up people.” Continue…
