Last Saturday, Instagram account @TheShadeRoom posted a screenshot of a comment left by the singer and actor Countess Vaughn on the Instagram of her former Moesha co-star Brandy. It read, in part: "I apologize for anything Negative I've ever done are [sic] said to you ... sorry this had to be on social media, I just want the world to see that I've grown out of my comfort zone." The apology was a long time coming: In 1998, Brandy told Vibe that Vaughn had left Moesha out of jealousy.

The Shade Room posted it with the comment "#CountessVaughn sends out an apology to former cast mate #Brandy." This was classic Shade Room: It assumed that its mostly black audience would be familiar with the long-simmering conflict, and more important, The Shade Room knew that this would be big news. Within 24 hours, the apology had been picked up by Vibe, BET, Rolling Out, and other sites that cater to a black readership. But The Shade Room was there first.

Since its launch almost two years ago, The Shade Room has quickly gained readers thanks to its quick-hit, bottom-up approach to black celebrity gossip. There were other websites about black celebrities, to be sure, but The Shade Room was the first to launch on the platform — Instagram — where many of its readers spent much of their time. It aggregated from existing sites like TMZ or Bossip but gave gossip a social media spin: It actually did detective work on Instagram to figure out who was dating whom, who had broken up, who was in a fight. If Nicki Minaj liked a photo, then The Shade Room would screengrab the like and post it with a comment. If Kourtney Kardashian unfollowed Scott Disick, The Shade Room noticed. If Deion Sanders' daughter posted a photo not-so-subtly mocking her ex-stepmother — well, The Shade Room was there, monitoring, watching, screenshotting.

Behind it all is a 25-year-old Los Angeles resident named Angie Nwandu, who started posting on Instagram as @TheShadeRoom in March 2014. At the time, she was unemployed and just looking for an outlet for her writing. Within two weeks, she had 10,000 followers; today, the account has 2.6 million and has spawned a website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, Snapchat account, and online store.

"A lot of people wondered if we could ever get off Instagram, if we could build something bigger," Nwandu told me when we met at a Brazilian restaurant in West L.A. on a sunny November afternoon. In a purple top, black skirt, and heels, she was the best-dressed person in the restaurant.

Nwandu started The Shade Room right after she'd quit a dead-end job as an accountant for a motorcycle company that, she told me, had stopped paying her. Now she has a full-time staff of four who work in shifts to publish 24 hours a day; 20 unpaid interns around the country who work around 10 hours a week, going to events and keeping an ear to the ground in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and L.A.; and an ever-growing number of readers, aka "Roommates," who submit tips of varying levels of accuracy, like a recent one that spotted the singer Teyana Taylor entering a hospital in Cleveland with her boyfriend, the basketball player Iman Shumpert; the tip said Taylor was "about to deliver" her baby, but it turned out that Taylor had in fact already had the baby at home — delivered by Shumpert. Still, The Shade Room broke the news that something involving Taylor's baby was happening a day before any other site had reported it.