Is Pop Crave the future of political journalism?

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, Threads, or (especially) the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered a Pop Crave post. The odds are probably higher if you’re chronically online — and if you’re a younger stan of any particular celebrity, you might even be a regular consumer of its updates.

Describing itself as the “go-to source for everything pop culture,” the entertainment news website once called the “ESPN of pop music” has exploded in popularity since it launched as a Twitter account in December 2015. (Though the company has rebranded as X, we’ll refer to it as Twitter for clarity in this story.) It has accumulated over 1.5 million followers on Twitter in that time, about 200,000 followers on Instagram, and about 60,000 on Threads.

Its mostly anonymous staff run a proper website featuring interviews with minor celebrities, movie reviews, and photo galleries, and it’s been known to break pop culture news, publish exclusive promotion for movies and TV shows, and, in 2020, announce the results of the presidential election a full day before many of the country’s major newspapers, wire services, or television networks. (Pop Crave cited Decision Desk HQ in its tweet, which has also partnered with Vox for election coverage.)

Pop Crave faced some bemused reactions at the time, but it was also a more visible sign of how the times would be changing on social media.