On the afternoon of September 15, when news began to break about a second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, one upstart celebrity news aggregator beat most major news organizations to the punch. Pop Crave, a pop culture-focused account with 1.8 million followers, posted that Trump was unharmed by the attempt at 2:41—well before it was shared by the accounts of the Associated Press (2:45 p.m.), CNN (3:10 p.m.), NBC News (3:13 p.m.), and The New York Times (3:21 p.m.). The account’s first post after the Trump news was a video of Taylor Swift arriving at Kansas Chiefs game to cheer on boyfriend Travis Kelce.
Though it is the largest such account, Pop Crave is by no means the only celeb-obsessed quasi-outlet expanding into political news. Others, including Pop Base and Liza Minelli Outlives, mostly track Billboard charts and celebrity news, but throughout 2024, have become a stalwart source of election updates on X. And the social app’s influence remains large: Even under Elon Musk’s ownership, it’s where 12% of Americans regularly get news.
“There’s this assumption that pop is supposedly more vapid and shallow than politics,” says Daniel Trielli, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. “Having covered politicians as a journalist, and having studied politics for a while, I’m not sure I completely ascribe to this idea that politicians are somehow deeper and more intellectual than pop artists.”
At the very least, politicians understand the cultural value of pop. These accounts have expanded beyond celebrity news during an election that, in part due to Vice President Kamala Harris’s late entry, has felt particularly reliant on pop-star buy-in. When Swift endorsed Harris, more than 406,000 people visited the voter-registration link the pop star shared. After singer Charli XCX declared “Kamala is brat,” referencing her viral album, the campaign employed brat‘s minimalist, neon-green design elements for some of its official channels. Harris has also sold millions of dollars’ worth of camo hats that bear a striking resemblance to popular Chappell Roan merch.
With trust in the media itself is at a record low, the pop news aggregators have benefited from interest in news sources outside the mainstream (Vox’s Christian Paz calls them “the internet’s wire service”). But the media world is wary of them, and not just out of self-interest. Journalists lament their unclear sourcing and habit of not crediting outlets that actually broke the news they post. Their business models are also unclear, and their format makes them susceptible to copycat accounts that can easily spread misinformation.
Nevertheless, the 2024 election has shown they have substantial reach; its aftermath will show if Pop Crave and its competitors can become more established sources of political news. If they are to be taken seriously, there’s work to be done if they want to build an engaged political audience beyond pop music stans.
What are the pop-culture accounts dipping into politics?
Despite its place of primacy among its peers, Pop Crave, founded in 2015 by CEO Will Cosme, did not respond to requests for comment. But with its 1.8 million X followers, plus 29,000 more plugged in on TikTok, the Miami-based company has between two and 10 employees, per LinkedIn. They include COO Wilnette Ortega, whose news background is in digital advertising at a local Miami outlet, and social media director Raul Mencia, plus some freelance editorial contributors.
The No. 2 to Pop Crave is the similarly named Pop Base, which has 1.6 million followers. Its X bio declares Pop Base the “best source for all pop culture,” which makes it an unlikely source for breaking election updates. According to its founders, who requested anonymity to keep the page nameless, they chose to start covering harder news in 2020, when both the pandemic was raging and the presidential election was speeding up. “We are reporting to a younger audience,” a Pop Base creator says. “It was just important for them to have eyes on that. As a part of Gen Z, I saw myself wanting to know these things, to know this news, and to get it as it came out.”
That fusion of pop culture and politics can be a normalizing force for government and politics, according to University of Maryland assistant professor Daniel Trielli. It makes pop culture’s younger, less engaged audience “more familiar with it and more comfortable talking about it.”
While Pop Base’s founders wouldn’t comment directly on the business’ financials, they describe a small but orderly organizational chart. Alongside the company’s three co-founders, they have 15 employees, who are separated by social media feed. They call the X team their most “organic,” while smaller Instagram, vertical video, and newsletter teams have been built around it. (Pop Base’s Instagram is currently down, which they chock up to a copyright claim “that has since been retracted.” They’re in talks with Instagram to get the account back up; before, they estimate that it had 227,000 followers.)
But nothing has stuck quite like X, where Pop Base’s follower count dwarfs that of the other platforms. While its influence has shrunk since Musk’s acquisition, the platform remains popular with 570 million monthly active users. It’s particularly big in the political arena, where accounts like Pop Base are expanding: Joe Biden himself announced his departure from the Democratic ticket on X.
The move toward election updates has proved successful for Pop Base. These posts are often engagement catnip, with a recent repost of Harris gaining more than 120,000 likes and 2.3 million views in about 15 hours. Both Pop Base and its competitor, Pop Crave, were invited to the Democratic National Convention, where they created original content and interviewed leaders like Elizabeth Warren.
While Pop Crave and Pop Base intentionally place themselves in the media world, other, similar accounts are less intentional in their news-breaking. Scott Gorenstein had no journalistic intentions when he started Liza Minnelli Outlives as a tribute to the Broadway legend’s longevity. Though it started with a funny premise—and remains an unprofitable side gig to Gorenstein’s day-to-day work as a publicist—Liza Minelli Outlives became a genuine source of breaking news for some X users when Biden dropped out and Gorenstein declared “Liza Minnelli has outlived Joe Biden’s race for reelection.”
“Do I want people to tell me that they learned [the news] from me? Yeah, of course I do,” Gorenstein says. “What’s the competition? Am I competing with The New York Times? I’d have to be delusional to think that. But, when I get the news out quicker than The New York Times, it doesn’t suck.”
New outlets, old problems
The race among pop aggregators to break news during an election year really started in August 2023 when former President Donald Trump, having just been indicted on racketeering in Georgia, was set to take a mugshot at the Fulton County Jail. Ultimately Pop Crave and Pop Base tied at a posting time of 8:40 p.m., while Liza Minelli Outlives was a minute behind at 8:41 p.m. (During our chat, Pop Base claims they were first to post, likely seconds before Pop Crave.)
When asked about the pressure to break news, Pop Base’s founders see themselves as fitting into the larger media push to be first with critical information. “Even when it comes to the big sources like CNN [and] NBC, there’s always a race to get the exclusive, to be the first one to put it out,” a Pop Base creator says.
But outlets like CNN and NBC have clearly laid out editorial procedures, whereas the rules governing what breaking political news merits a post from Pop Crave or Pop Base is less clear, despite Pop Crave’s Cosme telling Business Insider that the page had a robust fact-checking process. Pop Base says its sourcing is largely from newsletters and post notifications, also noting that they receive tips from journalists looking to promote their work. Liza Minneli Outlives owner Gorenstein credits his work as a publicist for remaining in the know.
“There’s a lot of conversation in general right now around journalistic standards,” says Rachel Karten, writer of Link in Bio, a newsletter about social media. “Everyone wants to scoop and be the first, and these accounts seem to relish in the fact that they don’t have those standards.”
This approach has frequently put pop news aggregators at odds with legacy media. Thinkpieces span the web declaring Pop Crave the end of salient journalism. When an X users gloated that Pop Crave broke Harris’s VP choice of Tim Walz before NBC News, media names fought back: “Pop Crave uses other people’s reporting while reputable news outlets confirms the info with the actual sources. Hope that helps!” writer Raven Brunner posted.
As the turf war between legacy media and social outlets continues to grow, this opacity of sourcing will continue to be a point of contention. University of Mayland’s Trielli calls it a “growing pain” for these X aggregators.
“In the past, a lot of organizations that are based on social media got burned by publishing things that they didn’t have confirmation for,” Trielli says. “It’s up to us as audiences to analyze, ‘Okay, this web page, although it only talks about celebrities and fluff, they do it in a way that’s responsible. So if they’re talking about the 2024 election, I can trust them.’”
The future of (social) media
With ballots being cast, it will remain to be seen whether these pop aggregators will be able to parlay the wide, election-year interest in politics into a longer-term effort to be sources for serious news. Social media experts say it may be short-lived, simply because of how they share news.
In digital media scholarship, there’s something called “incidental exposure,” where online users passively stumble upon news items. This compares to “intentional exposure,” in which users seek news out. Accounts like Pop Base offer a double whammy of incidental political news: Not only are the news items buried in a broader X feed, but they’re also coming from an account that traditionally posts celebrity content.
“Incidental exposure is giving you an opportunity to do anything with that information, but people mostly dismiss it” says Jana Dreston, a PhD student at the University of Duisburg-Essen who’s studied social media’s impact on political engagement. “Will I do anything with this information? Most of the time, no, you just scroll past it. So most incidental exposure can’t have any effects, because you’re not engaging with it.”
Andreas Nanz, a postdoctoral researcher studying political communication at the Technical University of Munich, adds that incidental exposure is especially ineffective for those who are uninterested in government. While the political junkies may benefit from a Pop Base update about Trump or Harris, the average scroller treats these as “more of an annoyance,” Nanz says.
There’s also an ongoing problem of imitation pages that spread joking misinformation, but can impact trust in pop aggregators overall. Poo Crave, for example, riffs on Pop Crave’s format and logo, providing almost identical content that reports fake news. The account blew up with a lie about Justin Timberlake that much of the digital masses fell for; now, they’re breaking into political parody.
“I’ve fallen for Poo Crave multiple times,” Link in Bio’s Karten says. “I don’t fall for fake New York Times things, right? It’s a very replicable format. . . . In a way, we should feel lucky that Pop Crave and Pop Base are saying truthful things, because it shows it’d be very easy for them to not and it would still get a lot of reach.”
When asked for comment via DM, Poo Crave wrote: “Sometimes fake news can be more powerful than real news, because it makes you question what’s real, and what’s news.”
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