Angelica Nwandu has always had a thing for celebrity gossip. So when she found herself unemployed in 2014 after quitting her job as an accountant to follow her dream of becoming a screenwriter, she spent her free time in her cramped apartment in downtown Los Angeles consuming it and talking about it with her friends, one of which pushed her to launch her own gossip site. The tip became an Instagram account he called The Shade Room (TSR). Nwandu's first post explained the name. “I said, 'The Shade Room is the room of truth,'” he recalls. “The shadow enters the depths of culture. When you think about the Black diaspora, a lot of times we are so brutally honest with each other,” Nwandu says. “I see it as much deeper than how it is portrayed in the media. It's described as something petty, but I think it has to do with survival.
Since its inception, The Shade Room has combined celebrity news with coverage of politics and national issues such as police brutality. What made it stand out was the access to bold names. Rather than just looking in from the outside, TSR boasted exclusive photos (like a 2018 snapshot of Kourtney Kardashian, Scott Disick and Sofia Richie) and exclusive interviews (like rapper Quavo's heartbroken reaction to the death of his musical partner Takeoff) and made it easy for celebrities and their followers to continue their conversations through the raucous comments section. Nwandu stalked established gossip sites, repurposed The Shade Room stories with his unique commentary, and scoured Instagram pages for likes and comments on celebrity posts, something that would become a key technique for creating of rehearsals at The Shade Room. Her ability to speak to readers in a language they understood (her voice resembles that of your best girlfriend keeping you in the loop) and at the same time deliver reliable news made her Instagram account a success.
Before long, Hollywood companies looking to connect with black audiences began contacting her. He recently worked with Columbia Pictures, for example, on the promotional campaign for Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Because of the stigma surrounding the supposed “toxicity” of gossip journalism, Nwandu recalls, “It took time to break down and build trust with advertisers and celebrities.” Part of that meant forgoing a tone that had been criticized as homophobic, which Nwandu admits is still a work in progress.
Nwandu began augmenting the staff, building a team of more than 40 journalists, and before long his solo Instagram project became a true black media empire, attracting more than 29 million followers, generating millions in revenue and attracting venture capital investments. This led to greater credibility and, ultimately, access to the White House, where TSR is the only gossip site to be part of the presidential press pool.
TSR now provides content across a variety of social media platforms and digital products, including a website, newsletter and video programming, all while maintaining a distinct voice coded in black jargon and sharp wit, as it weighs in on everything from alleged feud between Naomi Campbell and Rihanna at the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign's HBCU homecoming tour.
Despite his success, Nwandu is still, at least spiritually, serving his friends in that cramped apartment. She imagines that TSR's followers, known as “housemates,” are right there with her, spilling the tea, dropping steamy takes, and clapping back in the comments. “All your business is on the table: anyone who got bad grades in school, anyone who got pregnant, anyone who went to prison, anyone who got in trouble with this and that, it's all going to come out on the table. And we'll laugh, we'll talk, we'll make fun of you and then we'll move on because we still love you,” he says. “So this is the environment we've built in this community.”
This story appears in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to sign up.