How Vancouver’s Lainey Gossip got the scoop on Katie Holmes
When it comes to celebrity gossip, bigger isn’t always better.
Some of the biggest news about the Biggest Celebrity Divorce Ever© hasn’t come from the weathered hordes of American celebrity bloggers and megasites such as TMZ.com, but from the Vancouver home of Lainey Lui, a Canadian blogger who has run her own site at laineygossip.com since 2005.
Since her first big scoop – she was the first to report Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would have their baby Shiloh in Africa – she has leveraged her strong opinions and willingness to take sides in celebrity battles to win over sources friendly to the world’s biggest names.
And so it was that she was at the front of the pack in covering Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s divorce, and was among the first to report that a desire to live in New York was as much a part of Holmes’s decision as worries about Scientology.
She’s an example of the new media landscape, where access to printing presses and television cameras aren’t enough to put you at the front of the biggest stories. Armed with only a computer and the promise of anonymity for her sources, she has built a brand that generates enough income to keep her in the game full time.