Now, The Shade Room has more than half a million followers on Instagram alone. Eventually, readers started sending her tips and videos via Instagram’s direct-messaging feature. 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. When she started the feed a year ago, her goal was to accumulate 10,000 followers in the first year. For her purposes, Instagram was the equivalent of WordPress.
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.Īngie explained to me that Instagram perfectly suited her vision for The Shade Room: image-centric and interactive. 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. In a video update, DaniLeigh said DaBaby “ain’t even been here this whole time that I’ve had this child.” She also pushed back against what she explained as an inaccurate image of her that’s been painted by DaBaby and others online.The first time I heard about The Shade Room, I thought it was a reality show, or maybe a nightclub. “This all goes to say that this man is a fucking coward,” she said in one post. The Back On My Baby Jesus Shit Again artist, meanwhile, is heard alleging that it’s for his “safety.”įrom there, a number of statements from both parties were made public, including one in which DaBaby alleged to have been “beat on and yelled at and chased around.” DaniLeigh, meanwhile, said in her own statements and video responses that she and DaBaby had been living together for the past three months and-on the evening in question-he allegedly came into the room where she was feeding their child and suddenly told her to leave. At one point in the footage, DaniLeigh seemingly holds up a pillow to prevent DaBaby from continuing to record the footage and also questions why he is filming at all. The statement follows an Instagram Live during which DaBaby filmed DaniLeigh while she was feeding their child. DaBaby-who earlier this year made inaccurate, harmful, and homophobic comments at Rolling Loud Miami-is now facing criticism for electing to promote his upcoming show dates in a statement about DaniLeigh, with whom he shares an infant daughter.