As the Founding Editor of GhanaCelebrities.Com, I make some of the most difficult publishing decisions that readers may never have an idea about—including, whether to run certain exclusive stories or just let them slide because of the foreseeable consequences.
When people ask me how come you live in the United Kingdom, thousands of miles away from Ghana and yet continue to break some of the biggest Entertainment news for those in Ghana and journalists close to the subject to just copy and paste, I mostly say: “contacts is key to contemporary journalism and not location.”
I sit somewhere in the United Kingdom at my workstation, mostly in my boxer shorts behind a computer surrounded by random items including a note book of exclusives obtained from several of our reliable contacts from Ghana.
When a contact furnished me with Stonebwoy’s wedding invitation card and information that the dancehall artist was getting married on 16 June 2017 at a private ceremony in Accra to Dr Louisa Ansong–as someone who recently got married, I was excited for Stonebwoy and I knew it wouldn’t affect him much if news on his upcoming nuptial was published.
But there is a second person involved, Louisa Ansong, who may not really appreciate a national conversation around her impending wedding—I said to myself.
From a conversation with my contact, it was quickly established that Louisa Ansong is not new to the media. She made headlines in 2016 when she won KNUST’s best dentist student award.
Even with this information, I somewhat felt the fact that the entire Stonebwoy-Louisa relationship had been kept a secret meant that someone in that relationship cherished a far-reaching privacy—and breaking that veil of privacy a few days to their wedding may mount an added layer of stress and perhaps even throw questions into the person’s mind as to the privacy of their future deeds.
Of course, the news breaking journalistic blood in me pushed on. And I decided that, if GhanaCelebrities.Com lets the cat out of the bag a few days to the event, it wouldn’t be that bad—especially if we do not put in the public domain the exact location of the wedding by cropping that out of the invitation card, our primary evidence.
So GhanaCelebrities.Com broke the news yesterday and it caught fire, with almost every media outlet in Ghana and Nigeria running with it—followed by the excitement of Stonebwoy’s fans.
Stonebwoy marrying an intelligent doctor is a big deal but I’ve seen several others, presumably Shatta Wale’s fans on social media saying, if he’s getting married to a doctor AND SO WHAT. That’s something I do not want to get into this time though it’s one of the things I expected would happen, considering the hovering rivalry.
GhanaCelebritis.Com’s publication used several Facebook photos of Louisa and soon those photos started flying on social media—she was literally on every Ghanaian’s Facebook timeline. I suspect thousands started hitting her Facebook page and even started sending her friends’ requests.
Now, she has disappeared from Facebook, possibly she has deactivated her account. It seems she’s the privacy cherisher in the relationship but a few days to a wedding she had tried her best to keep under the radar, it’s everywhere–simply because I gave the greenlight.
I feel sorry the decision I took seems to have pushed her out this way but she should by now know she’s marrying multiple awards winning Ghanaian artist and therefore shouldn’t expect any sort of privacy by default.
Unfortunately, her privacy lies in the hands of Editors like me, sitting across the ocean with fancy computers and ideas, and sometimes without enough time to fully consider anything beyond public interest.
Louisa, have a great wedding but stop running. The more you attempt to hide from the media, the more the media becomes interested in your affairs.