Reporting gossip on Instagram

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, rather than settle in an accountant’s job, 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 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 intra-celebrity trash talk.

After her initial success, Angie started Facebook and Twitter accounts for The Shade Room and even a website, but its Instagram account feels the most lively. The format is nimble and lightweight, allowing Angie to publish stories that are newsworthy only within the context of the stream — the sort of outrageous moments online you might screen grab and send to friends.

Since its start in early 2014, The Shade Room has grown into a lucrative enterprise. Angie told me that advertisers pay several hundred dollars to run ads on her Instagram and Facebook feeds, which might help explain why The Shade Room isn’t the only tabloidy Instagram account to gain popularity in the last year or two. There’s also Entertainment for Breakfast (39,000 followers) and BallerAlert (567,000 followers). (BallerAlert, in fact, started out as a text-messaging service that notified users of celebrity sightings at nightclubs, restaurants and the like.)

The sheer thrift of this form of reporting helps, too. “Back in the day, you had to dig and investigate for a story,” says Stephanie Ogbogu, the 30-year-old editor of BallerAlert. “Now you don’t have to. You can just go to their Instagram page and see who they’re tagging and following. It’s so much easier.”

Despite the gossip business’s nasty reputation, the proximity to fame engendered by social media seems to encourage cordiality. The Shade Room works because the stars tacitly approve: It is not uncommon for celebrities themselves to chime in and interact with Angie’s readers.

As Angie and I finished our meals, we talked about the risks of building a business on top of a much larger business. The Shade Room’s account was already hacked and deleted once, and if someday Instagram decided to change its policies, her publication could vanish into the ether forever.