By JACKSON IWUANORUE
Once upon a time, she was a super model. As a model, she achieved fame and fulfillment. Her success stretched from fashion runways to billboards. Even today, she still has the grace, the glamour and the gloss of a first-class model - she is still drop-down gorgeous. Linda Ikeji, however, has since moved on. For her, modeling has become history, “a thing of yesterday”.She opened new vistas as an entrepreneur and an author. But those are not the big chapters in her life. “I am now a blogger 100 percent,” she tells any listening ears. In her new endeavour, the author of It Takes You is proving her mettle. Her self-titled blog, an online Mecca visited by countless Nigerians on a daily basis (and a leading source for some of the big stories that trended heavily in 2011) finished the year 2011 among the top 20 popular blogs in Nigeria. From cause célèbre to celebrity gist, her blog is a veritable source.
In this encounter, the Imo-born model-turned-blogger talks about the dynamics of running a blog. The acclaimed Nigeria’s Queen of Blog also muses about finding love: “I am not looking for a man; I am looking for love,” she quips. Linda is amiable, but she talks with an engaging gravitas. She is also blunt.
How is life as a blogger?
It’s nice. I am enjoying it.
When and how did you start blogging?
I started in 2006. A friend of mine called me, she said “Linda I read about you on a website.” She emailed the link to me. I looked up the website and it was Bellanaija. I read the story and the comments. I saw other things and I enjoyed it. From that day, I started going to that blog everyday for about six months. One day I said to myself: “I want to do this too. I want to own a blog too.” So I started my blog in December 2006.
How do you get contents for your blog?
That is the biggest challenge of owning a blog – looking for contents, especially when you have thousands of people checking your blog on a daily basis, looking for information. One of the things I do is that I keep my ears to the ground; I go on twitter, I talk to celebrities; but more importantly I get exclusive stories – people send them to me. In fact I have some stories I cannot upload on my blog.
Because people know me, I don’t want somebody to come and pick me up for anything. Celebrities’ friends – friends of celebrities - offer me stories about their friends but most of them I don’t upload them on my blog. If I were anonymous, maybe I wouldn’t bother. But I am well-known. So I look at the materials critically. I also scour through magazines too. So I get my stories from different sources.
That means most of the time you are busy on the internet?
Yes, I am busy. In a day I spend about 10 hours on the internet. Sometimes too, I can spend just about one hour; it depends on how many stories I have on my hand. Sometimes I just do four hours and I am done for the day. But I enjoy it. And I feel like I have the best job in the world. Because I have free time to myself, I can choose to go and watch movies at the cinemas, come back and continue blogging. At the moment I am doing it all alone but I am contemplating employing other hands to work for me.
You said it is not every material that come that you upload. Is that a way of avoiding controversy?
Not that I don’t want controversy; controversy is good if you have the time. Controversy is not bad. I just don’t want to get into a scenario where people will start gunning for me, looking for me to pick me up or to do something bad to me. That is what I am avoiding. But if it is controversial and I have evidence that it is true, why not? When people send me stories, I don’t know if it is true or false; they just tell me this happened. How do I verify? If you send me pictures, and there are people to back up the story, I will put it on my blog. But if you send me a story and there is nothing to back it up, I will avoid putting such on my blog.
How do you feel when celebrities allege that you have gone too far by uploading stories about them on your blog?
I don’t put stories on my blog to insult celebrities. Most time it is positive news. My readers are very diverse and so are their comments; it is the comments that are so bad that get the celebrities offended, it’s not me writing bad things about them, however, because they (celebrities) cannot take out their anger on the anonymous writers, they pick on me instead, feeling that I gave the anonymous writers the platform to insult them, hence they transfer the aggression to me. Its fine by me anyway; there is no way you will run a blog and you will not have to deal with such issues. That’s why sometimes when people insult me on my blog, I upload the comments too.
Has anyone ever called you with regard to what you put on your blog with a demand that you take it down?
Of course. I put up a picture yesterday and somebody called me that it is too brutal. The other day I put up pictures of somebody’s daughter. They didn’t like it so they called me and the woman said: ‘this is my three-year-old daughter you put on your blog, you know all kind of people are on the internet, can you please take it down?” That I understand, because I asked myself: “if I have a three-year-old daughter would I want her picture on the internet?” If I put a picture of a man hugging somebody and he called me that “you know I am married,” blah, blah. That also I understand. But when I put up a good story of something that happened to you and you now call me and tell me to take it down - if you don’t give me a good enough reason, I wouldn’t. Even if you threaten, I would not acknowledge your message.
How do you do gate keeping on the materials sent to you?
A lot of the materials I get are very negative. For instance, someone recently sent me pictures of a married actor caught in a compromising position with a girl that is not his wife. I asked myself, “If I put up this picture, will it not destroy his marriage?” Two days ago somebody sent me the picture of Before and After of an actress who was alleged to have done a Botox. I looked at the picture and I could detect slight differences but I don’t know for sure if really she had taken shots of Botox. If I had seen her with my very eyes, like I went to the US and I ran into her where she went for the treatment, I will take the picture and I will write the story myself and I will stand by it.
Today you are known for blogging than modeling. What happened to modeling?
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