LIVING IN THE FAST LANE
The hits keep coming for Elaine Lui, who is in Toronto to co-host a new daytime talk show
Vancouver-bred gossip hound Elaine Lui has followed her nose to Toronto, where she’s preparing to launch the new daily talk show, The Social.
Lui, who parlayed a part-time gossip blog she started more than a decade ago into a full-time media career, will add the new four-woman show to her reporting duties with CTV’s eTalk and her ongoing blog laineygossip.com.
“It’s pressure. It’s a new show. It hasn’t been done in Canada yet,” Lui said over the phone earlier this month when taking a break from rehearsals.
The former social housing worker is part of an on-air quartet with Toronto news anchor Melissa Grelo, relationship adviser Cynthia Loyst and entertainment reporter Traci Melchor.
“It’s intimidating being part of the maiden voyage,” Lui says.
Lui took her first steps into the gossip trade in 2002, when she had to leave a job at the University of B.C. to care for her ailing mother. She kept in touch with a couple of former colleagues at UBC by sending them regular emails that included her take on celebrity news. Those friends started forwarding Lui’s gossipy missives to their friends, and readership gradually crept from dozens, to hundreds, to thousands.
By 2003, Lui had taken a new job as a development officer helping to raise money for Vancouver’s downtown Covenant House for at-risk youth.
In late 2004, she turned the newsletter into her blog laineygossip.com, and started drawing a worldwide readership that including many Hollywood insiders who started feeding her tips.
“Celebrities are smoke and mirrors, and what I was doing was articulating publicly what people were saying privately about their favourite stars,” she says. “You weren’t getting that in the past in the celebrity-friendly magazines. People were turning to the blogs to have the conversations they wanted to have about these people. That was initially what drew the audience in.”
The producers of eTalk hired her as a reporter in 2005, and she left her day job shortly after. “Since then I’ve been working on my blog and doing television full time,” Lui says.
Her time has just got more full with the new show, which meant Lui and her business-partner husband Jacek Szenowicz had to move to Toronto in July.
“It’s tight, I have to stick to a pretty rigid schedule,” she says. “I start blogging about 5 a.m., and go to work at The Social about 10 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. I move over to eTalk at 2:45 to about 5:30 p.m., and through it all I’m still blogging, still updating my site.”
The new show puts Lui and her three colleagues up front as personalities, kicking off each day with a roundtable talk on the day’s headlines, celebrity news and trends, followed by lifestyle segments. The show will also have guest hosts joining the four.
Lui says the show will also be driven by social media, as the hosts and at-home audience interact live online.
“The crux of The Social is the four personalities,” she says. “We’re all so different: Melissa comes from a news anchor background, Cynthia is a relationship expert, I’m a dirty gossip blogger.
“When you put the four of us together, we’re going to have different perspectives on everything from politics to motherhood to current affairs, entertainment, food, gardening, all that.”
Which also means that if viewers don’t like the show, it’s because they don’t like the personalities.
“I don’t worry about that, I don’t take it personally,” Lui says. “If they don’t like me, I won’t be able to do anything to change that.”
Lui’s blog has spawned one other project as well; regular posts about her immigrant mother, known online as “the squawking Chinese chicken,” drew interest from a book publisher.
“She’s a Chinese immigrant but Vegas-ified, larger than life,” says Lui, who has to deliver the finished book about her mother by the end of August.