Big outlets, investigative longforms and Sunday papers are falling to the wayside. Now, breaking stories often land first on pages that track celebrity airport fits and K-pop chart positions. If Pop Crave posts it on X, the newsroom picks it up later. Let's tale a look into the rise of stan accounts as primary news sources - what they get right, what they get dangerously wrong, and why the way millions of people receive information has fundamentally changed without anyone formally deciding it was okay.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Twenty business owners lock themselves in one room for 36 hours and build.
An AI tool, an automation, whatever you keep putting off. No teacher, no course. Just people building next to people who are also building.
September 12–13, Grey Lynn, Auckland. This is your sign.

TechCrunch reports that as part of an US$18 billion settlement with 29 US states, Meta has committed to a daily two-hour time limit for teens across Facebook and Instagram combined, disable-able only with parental permission. Additional changes include a default Night Mode blocking all access between midnight and 6am, push notifications muted during school hours, usage prompts every 15 minutes, the option to set a non-algorithmic feed as default, like counts hidden for minors by default, and a ban on extreme makeup filters for under-18s.

Meta also published an open letter asking TikTok and YouTube to implement the same limits - noting that $5.3 billion of the settlement is contingent on those platforms following suit. As of writing, TikTok and YouTube haven't responded.

In other controversy-ridden news, Callaway Golf's CEO publicly apologised this week after his company approved an ad where a woman was thrown to the ground over a golf driver. MarketWatch reports that the now-deleted video, produced by golf content brand Good Good Golf to promote a co-branded driver, showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving former Division I golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reached for his new driver. Clark then stood over her and coldly said: "Do not touch my new driver." The ad was pulled within hours after immediate, widespread condemnation for depicting violence against women.

CEO Chip Brewer's statement confirmed Callaway had seen and approved the video before it went live, adding: "That approval should never have happened. Mistakes were made." Given how the golf world has been trying to market itself as more inclusive in recent years, this might be as tone deaf as you can get.

And finally - mankind's greatest achievement is returning to the big screen. Variety reports that Pixar's Cars is returning to theatres from September 4 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. This also coincides with Lightning McQueen Day on September 5, honouring Owen Wilson's character's iconic number 95. The movie originally opened on June 9, 2006 and has become a cultural phenomenon since.

Limited edition collectible packaging and a Lightning McQueen popcorn bucket are also planned alongside the theatrical run. Twenty years on, the film that taught us why the journey matters more than the finish line is getting one more lap. Ka-motherf*cking-chow.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Whether we like it or not, the era of turning to traditional, buttoned-up journalistic institutions for breaking news is slowly dying, especially for teenagers and young adults who consume reality entirely through a vertical scroll.

Instead, pages like Pop Crave and Pop Base have elevated themselves from casual celebrity fan accounts into actual, institutional primary sources. Which is absolutely insane to say out loud. They are the new town criers of the internet, flattening complex global events into a single, punchy headline paired with a high-resolution photo, delivered directly to your feed before a traditional newsroom can even assemble a draft.

I’m in two minds about it. Let me explain.

On one hand, there is a genuinely liberating, democratic energy to this structural shift.

These decentralised, third-party aggregators aren't owned or managed by monolithic Big Media conglomerates, allowing for a r free, un-throttled flow of information and public speech.

They eliminate the friction of the traditional media paywall, serving breaking news exactly where the audience is already hanging out without forcing them to click through a clunky, ad-suffocated article. It breaks the monopoly that a handful of billionaire press barons historically held over public awareness, creating a flatter, faster, and more accessible information grid.

However, beyond the immediate convenience of the no-click headline, the dark side of the stan-to-newsroom pipeline is actually a little concerning. These accounts are completely independent of traditional journalistic credentials, rigorous criteria, or verified fact-checking standards. Think about it: they have zero institutional accountability.

A page that spent five years farming engagement metrics by tracking Selena Gomez’s street style or K-pop album chart positions can suddenly find itself breaking massive, highly sensitive geopolitical updates or economic announcements. Sorry????

When you strip away the editorial filter, you inherit a massive baseline risk of unsourced rumours, reactionary reporting, and unverified leaks being blasted to millions of impressionable followers as absolute fact.

The illusion these pop-culture aggregators peddle is the myth of the neutral, objective voice. Because their captions are written in a flat, clinical, and passive tone, audiences subconsciously interpret them as unbiased truth. But news is an inherently political act; the very decision of which headline to push and which story to ignore is a direct expression of a specific bias.

In a landscape where savvy political operatives and entertainment studios are actively seeding these accounts with targeted leaks to slip propaganda into feeds where users aren't expecting it, the passive reader becomes incredibly vulnerable to manipulation.

Getting off this merry-go-round of digital misinformation means media literacy has never been more important.

You cannot treat a social media post like a Sunday paper. Start recognising it as a piece of performance art designed to farm watch-time. Survival in the modern information economy means learning to properly interpret the texts crossing our timelines, questioning the provenance of the data, and understanding the commercial mechanics behind the screen.

Or don’t, and run the risk of sounding like an idiot. The choice is yours.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound is from Jeremy Wade's River Monsters, his deadpan narration while wading through genuinely dangerous water. He goes “I try to act normal and remain calm. But this is exactly the scenario I was dreading” Classic.

People are using that same energy for moments where you're internally aware things aren't going your way, whether you're being tested, caught out, or just straight up losing, and the only move is to act like everything's fine.

My fav examples include:

How you can jump on it
Use the sound, put up on-screen text revealing the situation you're actually cooked in.

A few ideas to get you started

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.