Chris Brown, the controversial pop singer, liked several Instagram photos posted by an ex-girlfriend, Karrueche Tran.

A screen shot of that ended up on The Shade Room. 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.

The typical Shade Room post is a screen shot paired with a snappy caption. 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. There are numerous popular accounts on Instagram that, rather than posting personal snapshots, focus instead on aggregating humorous videos and memes. 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. Rather than return to pencil-pushing, she started an entertainment site in her spare time. but was fired for playing hooky to attend a screenwriting workshop at Sundance. After college, she took a job in an accountant’s office in L.A. Her family is from Nigeria, and she settled in Los Angeles.

Over dinner, she sketched out a brief bio for me. But I located her right away: a petite young woman absorbed in the glow of her supersize smartphone.Īngie (who insisted on using her first name only), just 24, already employs a handful of writers and a brand manager. When I arranged to meet this person at a restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, to expect.

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. The first time I heard about The Shade Room, I thought it was a reality show, or maybe a nightclub.

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