Gossip hound

Zack Taylor, who blogs about Canadian celebrities on the website IsThisHappening.com. (Steve Carty/CBC)

If you don’t know Perez Hilton from Paris Hilton; if you confuse Los Angeles’s TMZ with Korea’s DMZ; if ET Canada, eTalk and other rah-rah, gaga gossip providers leave you cold; even if you don’t give a hump about celebrity baby bumps, it’s all good, partner — Zack Taylor is here to show you the light.

Taylor, 20, is Canada’s most ambitious celebrity blogger. Every day from noon-ish until 2 a.m., he writes, edits and produces IsThisHappening.com, “YOUR #1 SOURCE FOR CANADIAN CELEBRITY GOSSIP!!” (His all-caps and exclamation points, natch.) In the short time since IsThisHappening’s late-summer debut, it has established an audience of 200,000 unique visitors per month. Most have Canadian IP addresses.

“I could write Avril Lavigne broke her leg. Suddenly it’s a fact and everybody is talking about it,” Taylor says. Of course, he’d never actually do something like that — i.e., deliberately spread a false rumour. But he could.

Taylor gossips exclusively about Canadian celebs — a larger cohort than you may think — and foreign celebs who have Canadian connections. The strategy keeps him clear of Hollywood’s supersaturated gossip market — few U.S. bloggers care to write about, say, the marital plans of MuchMusic VJ Leah Miller.

“People in Canada can go to my site at any time and see where celebrities are [being] spotted. Like, Jennifer Aniston is in Vancouver right now,” he says. The man is a patriot.

Today is a special occasion. Taylor has booked a sit-down interview with Trish Stratus, the fitness model and former World Wrestling Entertainment personality. Stratus retired from the WWE in 2006 and is now opening her own yoga studio at a shopping mall north of Toronto. Taylor’s interview is her publicity, and vice versa. Quid pro quo is the currency of celebrity news.

Taylor waits in his office, a ground-floor den in his family’s home in Thornhill, Ont., a suburb north of Toronto. The decor features an array of antique clocks, a muted television showing 24-hour news and a guitar autographed by members of Glass Tiger, the Canadian band that had big hair and big domestic hits in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Taylor has a younger sister and brother. His mother sells antique furniture and his father owns a well-known demolition firm. “My parents love [IsThisHappening],” Zack says. “They’re both at work right now, on the site. I told them I’d be updating it a lot today, so they were like, ‘OK, we’ll go check it out.’”

Stratus is scheduled to arrive within the hour, but there were ominous rumblings from her camp earlier in the day: she may have a cold. Taylor calls her press agent for an update.

Actress Ellen Page is just one of the Canadian celebrities that Taylor regularly blogs about. (IsThisHappening.com)

It’s true. Stratus is bed-ridden, too sick even for a phone interview. “All right, just send me an e-mail and we’ll reschedule that. It’s OK. Tell her to feel better,” Taylor says. Upon hanging up, he seems nonplussed. As it happens, this is uncharted territory for IsThisHappening. “Any time I’ve ever set up an interview with people, whether it be Tila [Tequila] or Brody [Jenner] and Frankie [Delgado] from The Hills when they were here, nobody has ever cancelled,” Taylor says.

In appearance and tone, IsThisHappening mimics PerezHilton.com, the big papi of the internet’s gossip machine. Taylor knows Hilton, and says he used to pass him tips “back in the day.” They stopped speaking after IsThisHappening went live. Last November, Taylor sparked a Toronto tabloid scandal when he linked to a self-portrait of NHL rookie Jiří Tlustý performing a naked equipment check in a mirror. (No Leaf, no!) And mere weeks ago, Taylor broke the news of Avril Lavigne’s alleged pregnancy. The pop star’s representatives denied the claim, although Taylor is unconvinced: he’s still watching closely for evidence of a swelling belly.

“I’m very well connected with different television networks — I won’t say which ones — in Toronto and Montreal. A lot of PR agents talk to me. Plus I used to work in radio, so a lot of DJs send me tips,” says Taylor.

Actually, it’s Teperman; he changed his last name last year. After graduating from a Toronto college’s broadcasting program, Zack moved to Miami for a job as a producer and co-host at an FM station. When his bosses asked him to think of “something hip and more young” for his on-air handle, he thought “Zack Taylor” could be a winner. Then he realized it’s the name of the black Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. Perfect.

After several months working in South Beach, Taylor moved to another station; this one was in Yellowknife. It was there, though, that he began interviewing celebrities in earnest (albeit via telephone). Taylor hatched the idea for a celebrity blog, but knew he couldn’t manage it from the far north. He says it was the sight of snow last August that drove him back home to Thornhill.

“I said, ‘Hey, I can do this for a little bit, until I get bored. I haven’t gotten bored yet. [Blogging] has provided a lot of opportunities. There are a lot of other things in the works that I can’t talk about,” he says.

Taylor has a politician’s knack for deflection. Ask a question about Perez Hilton, get an answer about the time ITH was mentioned on VH1; search Taylor’s MySpace bio to confirm his work history (the college certificate on his bedroom wall reads June 2007), and you’ll see only the assurance that, “From small towns to big towns, Zack Taylor has seen it all!”

Having given up on Trish Stratus for today, Taylor looks forward to tomorrow, when he is set to post a different marquee interview, this time with Ashli Haynes, also known as The Virgin from the dating series MTV’s A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. For Taylor, Haynes will gamely discuss her former castmates’ “assets” — his pet term for breast enhancements — and snap a photo of herself holding a handwritten IsThisHappening.com poster. Just think, a few hundred or thousand more success stories like that, and IsThisHappening may well become the national sensation of its creator’s dreams.

Matthew McKinnon is a Toronto-based writer.

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