The accidental gossip queen

Growing up in North Toronto, self-proclaimed gossip maven Elaine “Lainey” Lui didn’t plan on becoming an entertainment reporter.

“I got into this pretty late,” she says. “It was all through an email that I started sending to two girlfriends and they just started sending that email to more and more people and those people started sending it to other people and the distribution list grew and grew to the point where it crashed my email server.”

Lui, who majored in French and History at the University of Western Ontario and had been working as a professional fundraiser before launching LaineyGossip.com, which receives over a million monthly visitors and helped her secure a reporting gig on Etalk.

“I’ve covered the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the Royal Wedding, I’ve gone to the Oscars I think six or seven years in a row, same for the Cannes Film Festival,” she says. “So I mean all the marquee events, most of them anyway, I’ve had the honour of reporting from, so it’s been really, really exciting.”

She hopes readers see her blog as more advanced than other gossip sources and focuses on the language and writing style, she says.

“We hope that it’s much more analytical than your standard entertainment website that just sort of says this person broke up with this person,” she says. “We really believe that the content on Lainey Gossip is, if you want, PhD style gossip.”

Although she now calls Vancouver home, Lui returns annually to host the SMUT Soirée, which took place on June 25 at the Evergreen Brick Works.

“It’s the seventh year of the party and every year it gets bigger and bigger,” she says. “For me the best part of that is I get to hang out with people who read the site everyday and gossip in a party setting, summertime, prosecco flowing.”

Some of her favourite memories from the area include going to the movies at Yonge and Eglinton, being involved in the drama program at Lawrence Park C.I. especially performing in a production of Circus, and hanging out in the bleachers at Lawrence Park.

“We walked everywhere and complained about walking but we made our best memories on those walks,” she says. “And it’s so convenient. Everything you need is right there, and you never have to go beyond a few blocks for weeks if you choose to.”