Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast.

I'm your hostess, Try and Hermostis, Sarah Nicole.

And each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that.

So get ready to get inspired, get candid, get real, because we are all in this digital

space together. Oh, I'm excited for today. One of my favorite follows is on the podcast,

Kiki Manique, aka the Talk of Shame podcast, Instagram, all the things. You are a self-made entertainment reporter. I freaking love your content.

And I'm excited to get into everything with you. So give everyone a little bit of a introduction into who you are.

Well, you know, I'm just Kiki Monique. And yeah, I mean, most people know me as the talk of shame.

I think some people don't even know my actual name. They're just like the talk of shame, which is fine. Yeah. How did you get into doing this? Like this is what fascinates me about you is that you, I don't remember at what point I actually started following you. You were covering a case of some sort, whether it was true crime or a court case. I think it was Johnny Depp, probably.

I feel like that's when a lot of people came on, yeah. Probably. I know I said this recently to Lex Niko. Similarly to you, you have a very unbiased approach to sharing about these things. And you have something in your bio. It's like reports on the things that you're curious about. Or what is that? It's like the things you need to know and the things you're nosy about essentially.

Yeah, the things that you're curious about or what is that? It's like the things you need to know and the things you're nosy about essentially. Yeah, the things you're nosy about. That's exactly it. Like cut through the crap. There's so much like I actually find it so funny when I watch entertainment channels on social media and people are in the comments like, nobody cares about this. But nobody's ever saying that on your content. Everyone's like, knows exactly what I was nosy about. Give me the goods. But that's so niche. Where did this whole path come from for you? Like, when did this all begin? The reality is, is like, I went to school for journalism. So I have always been interested in this path. And I've sort of like, you know, delved into it like here and there. You know, when I was in D.C., when I was in New York, I've always done it. But, you know, it never really stuck. And so I ended up in these corporate jobs. Obviously, you got to pay the bills. And like, that's the life you lead. And that's why, like, I hate to say it. but like COVID was the great equalizer. And, you know, lockdown just became everyone got, went to zero. You know, it was like I lost my business. I lost everything. I was at zero. And the only thing I had was TikTok, or at least everyone was talking about TikTok. So I was like, let me get on TikTok and just talk about something. And at that time, most people on TikTok were dancing and singing. And I was like, I don't do that. So I'm just going to talk. Now, if you go to TikTok, everyone is talking. But in 2020, there weren't a lot of talkers. So I stood out. And I felt like that's how I grew pretty quickly. And I did what I did best, which is pop culture. I mean, I grew up. My mom always had, you know, tabloids magazines in the house. I would read hers. And then, of course, when I was old enough, I got my own subscriptions. And so that is just what I've always loved. So I was like, if I'm just going to talk about that, why not? And especially for like, A lot of the Gen Z, there's stories that they've never even heard of. So just even revisiting that is kind of exciting for them. And so it kind of just grew from there. And that makes so much sense on why there's the true crime crossover. Because if you look at tabloid culture, that's always what it was. It was the royals, the celebrities, and true crime.

I was just listening to crime junkies as they did the whole breakdown of the Jean-Beney

Ramsey case. And I was like, I forgot how much this took over the entire tabloid news cycle.

And everything that we knew then is so different from when I listened to that podcast, I was like,

in what world is this the same story that I grew up seeing on the cover of tabloids as a child?

And we're seeing the story is shifting now because of new DNA and things like that.

But that's where you're right.

Like there's a lot of stuff that is like culturally so huge that now this new audience has

no idea about. So the crossover between, because I always wondered that, like how does true

crime intersect with that? But when you talk about tabloid culture, that's exactly it. Yeah. And

legacy media had such, they gate keep it. You know, they were the only ones that were allowed to report on

it. And we just had to sort of feed it. Now, we have access to all of that ourselves. Like, I know I have my own PACER account. I can log in. I can download my own lawsuits. And we just have a lot more access. And I think that's good. Of course, it can get bad, because when too many cooks are in the kitchen. It kind of, there's a lot of misinformation, which is why I always go back to my

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