Instagram’s TMZ (Published 2015) (2024)

The first time I heard about The Shade Room, I thought it was a reality show, or maybe a nightclub. It turned out to be neither, although I was close in spirit; it’s a new celebrity-entertainment publication with hundreds of thousands of readers and a secretive owner, which lends it an air of mystery and intrigue. When I arranged to meet this person at a restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, to expect. But I located her right away: a petite young woman absorbed in the glow of her supersize smartphone.

Angie (who insisted on using her first name only), just 24, already employs a handful of writers and a brand manager. Over dinner, she sketched out a brief bio for me. Her family is from Nigeria, and she settled in Los Angeles. After college, she took a job in an accountant’s office in L.A. but was fired for playing hooky to attend a screenwriting workshop at Sundance. Still, her time in Utah paid off. She won a grant to pursue filmmaking. Rather than return to pencil-pushing, she started an entertainment site in her spare time. It was to be a blog in the vein of MediaTakeOut or TMZ, but with one crucial difference: The Shade Room would be published entirely on Instagram.

There are numerous popular accounts on Instagram that, rather than posting personal snapshots, focus instead on aggregating humorous videos and memes. The Shade Room does something similar, but narrows its scope to celebrity news, so that it feels like an Internet-native Star Magazine sprinkled throughout your feed. The typical Shade Room post is a screen shot paired with a snappy caption. A few recent examples: Jackée Harry, the actress from the ’80s sitcom “227,” posted on Twitter about Jay Z’s new streaming service Tidal, joking that maybe it will “wash Iggy” Azalea back to Australia. A screen shot of that ended up on The Shade Room. Chris Brown, the controversial pop singer, liked several Instagram photos posted by an ex-girlfriend, Karrueche Tran. Evidence of that ended up on The Shade Room, accompanied by the caption, “There ain’t nothing like a man who will still show your pics some love after y’all break up.” When Rihanna and Nicki Minaj exchanged flirty banter on each other’s Instagram accounts, that ended up on The Shade Room, too.

The Shade Room is flourishing in a time when media outlets are struggling to figure out their relationship to social media: Is it a means of luring readers? Or a home for the news itself? Some — including The Times — are leaning toward the latter, and may start publishing news directly to Facebook. Angie leapfrogged that dilemma (seemingly unintentionally) by starting a quick-and-dirty magazine in the online space where she and her friends spend the most time gawking at celebrities anyway.

Angie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress. When she started the feed a year ago, her goal was to accumulate 10,000 followers in the first year. She accomplished that in only two weeks. Angie started by posting about people at the bottom of the celebrity hierarchy (minor reality stars, mostly) and worked her way up to bigger names, building her loyalties slowly. Eventually, readers started sending her tips and videos via Instagram’s direct-messaging feature. Now, The Shade Room has more than half a million followers on Instagram alone.

Part of The Shade Room’s appeal is an updated version of an old insight: Celebrities are just like us — they’re obsessed with likes, faves and follower counts, and are highly prone to posting things they come to regret online. Famous people might have regained some control of their public personas through social media, but this has only opened the door to a new form of gossip reporting. Rather than stalking celebs in the wilds of Beverly Hills, Angie and the Shade Room team prowl their profiles, looking for clues in the data exhaust of social media that can be made into news: hastily deleted tweets, Instagram follows that hint at a coming collaboration (or a covert romance) and intracelebrity trash talk. (As its name suggests, The Shade Room mostly traffics in “shade,” slang for an entertaining insult.)