As of 2018, The Shade Room was the second most popular publisher on Instagram in terms of likes and comments, behind 9GAG, a Hong Kong-based meme account.
After five years of steady growth in a copycat industry, no other cultural media outlet has come close to its speed, exclusives, and sheer volume of posts and engagement.
A community-sourced mix of celebrity gossip (star-powered feuds, messy breakups), celebrations of Black excellence, and cultural debates (Should you keep ketchup in the pantry or the fridge?), The Shade Room is an authentic expression of Black culture that can’t be easily imitated. At the same time, Nwandu created a unique and distinctly Black voice in pop culture news. The Shade Room fundamentally changed how pop culture news is delivered, consumed, and interacted with. Print media was still trying to figure out exactly how to transition to digital (or shutting down completely), and Nwandu was meeting readers where they were (and are)-endlessly thumbing through Instagram.īy noon, Angie Nwandu has received more than 600 text messages. With their group chats clogged, her friends suggested she use her newfound time and energy to start her own gossip blog. High-stakes celebrity negotiations have become business as usual for Nwandu, age 28, who started The Shade Room in 2014 while unemployed and thus freed up to text her friends the latest superstar breakups at lightspeed.
It would affect their career and they had invited us to that same birthday party so it felt weird.” “You don't want to ruin their job,” she tells me over fried rice and noodles at The Shade Room office. In the end, Nwandu never posted the video. The clip would get clicks, but at what cost? The footage, the kind that TMZ reporters might poison Harvey Levin's massive water bottle for, created a conundrum for the Instagram-based culture and news outlet. The video showed two siblings-"Really, really high up, big celebrities, right?" Nwandu says-snorting lines of cocaine right next to their mother, a celebrity in her own right. An important party, the sort you really only read about in celebrity weeklies or, well, The Shade Room. A Roommate, the moniker given to members of The Shade Room community, passed along footage from a birthday party. About a year ago, The Shade Room founder Angie Nwandu received a tip.
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