MTO News: The Untold Story of Media Take Out, Black Celebrity Gossip's Most Powerful Blog
If you follow hip-hop, R&B, reality TV, or NBA gossip, you have read MTO News without even knowing it. MTO — short for Media Take Out — is the blog-style gossip website that has defined Black celebrity news online for almost two decades. It’s loud, fast, sometimes messy, and undeniably influential.
Here is the full story.
What is MTO News?
Media Take Out (MTO News) is a gossip site dedicated to entertainment news and it is mainly geared towards African-American celebrities. It’s URL is mtonews.com / mediatakeout.com – still listed as Active, since it was launched in January 2006.
The home page opens today, and you get everything the brand has to offer: a steady flow of breaking news. It’s hip-hop, reality drama, sports, culture — you name it, and the mainstream tabloid, like People or TMZ, will typically not cover until it gets viral, such as Lil Durk’s legal case, Pusha T vs. Drake, RHOA and RHOBH drama, Kodak Black, Snoop Dogg, Diddy, Cardi B vs. Offset, Megan Thee Stallion, Knicks players and their girlfriends.
That’s purposeful since the outset.
From Wall Street to The Hot Seat is the Founder
Presently the founder of MTO News is Fred Mwangaguhunga who used to be an MTO lawyer. It’s a tale that is almost legendary in the world of digital media.
Mwangaguhunga is a graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York), and holds two degrees from Columbia University, and he was born to Ugandan parents in Washington, D.C. Before retiring from law practice, he practiced as a tax attorney on Wall Street.
The celebrity power quickly made Fred Mwangaguhunga, a former Wall Street tax attorney, to launch MediaTakeOut, “a place for the latest African-American celebrity news online.
Another adds detail: “Fred Mwangaguhunga is the owner and founder of the urban gossip website ‘MTO News,’ which he founded in 2006 and has since risen in popularity to garner millions of hits every day… After selling his washing business, Fred started blogging about celebrity rumors and news, and Media-TakeOut.com quickly gained notoriety.”
Entrepreneur.com has dubbed him “The Mogul of Black celebrity news. He intentionally maintained his site’s low profile for years, operating it more like a lean start-up rather than a conventional newsroom.
It was an obvious conclusion: in 2006, traditional tabloids were still making the switch from print to digital, but there was no TMZ or Perez Hilton that was fast and unfiltered and Black. Mwangaguhunga took the media momentum of the internet and used it to reach an audience that was not catered to by mainstream media — those who love urban culture, hip-hop, R&B, and sports stars, who are in general overlooked by the mainstream media.
How MTO Blew Up
There were two reasons why Media Take Out was inevitable.
1. Speed and Volume. MTO publishes 30-50 stories every day. The headlines are capitalized and phrases such as PICS, EXCLUSIVE, DETAILS or TRANSCTIPT appear to boost click-through rates. It is designed for mobile, Facebook shares and Google News.
2. Scoops that Mainstream Media had to admit they got. MTO may be known for gossip, but it has been the source of several “go national” stories. Wikipedia lists a few stories that Media Take Out has broken, such as Kim Kardashian’s first pregnancy, Remy Ma’s criminal charges and Michael Jordan’s divorce.
The site is extremely popular, with reports of receiving millions of unique visitors per month. During its heyday in the early 2010s, it was among the top entertainment websites for blacks in the US, every month.
The scale made it impossible to ignore the mainstream media. The site says it’s been referenced by Good Morning America, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, the New York Times, BET Style, MTV News and the ‘Page Six’ column in the New York Post, among others, as well as radio shows such as Wendy Williams, Howard Stern and Tom Joyner.
In 2013 the New York Times published the story “A Gossip Site Finds Its Niche,” which highlighted MTO’s impact, a rare moment of legacy media validation of the gossip blog.
The Business Model
The owner is Fred Mwangaguhunga and the revenue: Ads.
MTO is all about old internet business; no paywall, subscription or merch line. Monetizes via programmatic display ads, sponsored posts, high-volume SEO. The site has been built with a lightweight design, with no video player that auto plays and no heavy design, which was essential to gaining early audience growth on the phones with lower bandwidths.
It doesn’t need access journalism – which is rare for a red carpet interview, or even any need for a publicist to approve it – and so it can publish what other outlets won’t. That liberty is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
Controversy and Criticism
No MTO News article can be considered complete without the criticism.
Media Take Out has long been a target for accusations of sensationalism, unverified reporting and clickbait headlines that occasionally veered into defamation for years, by media critics and advocacy groups. It was like many gossip blogs at the time in that it went about making rumors before making corrections to them.
This change has been acknowledged by Fred Mwangaguhunga himself. He discusses the company’s sourcing efforts in recent years, when social media giants such as Facebook and Google began to crackdown on misinformation, and the “speed and responsibility,” of the business of celebrity news in interviews on podcasts like Pivotal Moment.
The tone of the site has also been criticized among the Black community, especially its treatment of Black women (e.g., “BLACK GF” is a rarity in headlines), as well as over the focus that falls on scandal instead of achievement. Defenders claim the show is just “a reflection of what the public wants to know about black celebrities” and that MTO gives “more coverage” to Black celebrities than any other show.
Its culture footprint cannot be denied. MTO is before The Shade Room, before Hollywood Unlocked, before Instagram gossip pages. It demonstrated that there was a huge, cashable audience of urban celebrities to be addressed in real time.
MTO News in 2025-2026
In today’s media landscape, MTO News is operating very differently. The new Shade Room faces off with Instagram’s own The Shade Room (with 30M+ followers), TikTok tea pages, YouTube commentators, and Twitter / X.
But it’s still alive due to its archive and its domain authority. Do a search on Google and type in “Did break up?” or “What killed Rihanna’s father? MTO will be on the first page. It’s still generating millions of referrals through its Facebook page, hence the high amount of direct traffic.
There is also been a little change in the content. As can be seen in the news, there’s been a shift away from “caught on beach” and more for legal battles (Diddy, Tory Lanez, Shannon Sharpe, YoungBoy), reality TV shows (RHOA, RHOP, RHOBH, The Valley) and NBA / NFL lifestyle stories. It’s no longer a “pure” gossip blog, but more of an urban news wire.
Why is MTO important?
According to Mwangaguhunga in a 2020 interview with Entrepreneur.com titled ‘The Mogul of Black Celebrity News: ‘Now is when Your Competition is at Its Weakest’’, crises are the time independent media has the opportunity to win.
This is the philosophy that makes MTO so long-lived. Media Take Out, which was born in a former lawyer’s apartment in January 2006, remains an Active presence, while BuzzFeed News closed down, Vice went bankrupt and many celebrity magazines went under.
That is important because it was the first one. It showed that black celebrity culture was NOT an offshoot of celebrity culture, it was the culture of celebrity. And it proved that you didn’t require a newsroom in Manhattan or a printing press to break a story on Kim Kardashian or Michael Jordan. All you had to do was to have a laptop, a tip line and some selfless determination to press publish.
Whether it’s a positive or negative influence, each Shade Room post, each Akademiks tweet and each TikTok tea spill today can be traced back to the blueprint Fred Mwangaguhunga drew with MTO News.
