Alexis Mikulski Ruiz
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz focuses on commerce coverage that connects music, entertainment and lifestyle, helping readers decide how to watch major events and what to buy around them. She writes for Rolling Stone as an e-commerce specialist, covering the products, platforms and deals that sit around awards shows, festivals, sports and everyday culture. Her beat combines music streaming guides with a broad slate of shopping and product recommendations across fashion, beauty, tech, food and wellness.
Streaming guides for music and live entertainment
At Rolling Stone, Mikulski Ruiz frequently writes service pieces that explain how to stream major cultural events, including music programming. Her work includes guides on watching award shows like the BET Awards online without cable, breaking down platform options and packages for viewers who rely on streaming services. She extends this format to live sports and team-specific coverage, with pieces such as “Live After Five: How to Watch the New York Knicks on…” that focus on where and how to tune in to games without a traditional TV subscription. During global tournaments, she has contributed to coverage like “Hosting a World Cup Watch Party This Week? Here’s How to Save With DashPass,” combining viewing advice with promotions and delivery perks for fans gathering to watch matches. Across these articles, the emphasis is on clear, practical guidance and the commerce details—subscriptions, apps, discounts—that shape how audiences experience live music and entertainment.
Music-adjacent commerce: festivals, merch and tickets
Mikulski Ruiz regularly covers the buying side of live music, particularly tickets and merchandise tied to festivals and iconic artists. In “Where to Find the Best Last-Minute Ticket Deals to the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival,” she walks readers through platforms and strategies for securing entry to a major summer festival, highlighting price differences and limited-time offers. She has also co-written coverage of an annual summer music festival taking place June 5–7 in Flushing, contributing to a multi-author guide that situates ticketing and attendance within a broader editorial package. Her “Born to Buy: From Exclusive Vinyl to Graphic Tees, We Spotted the Best Bruce…” piece takes a similar approach to artist-branded merch, surveying vinyl editions and apparel so fans can choose how to show their fandom. Taken together, these stories show her focus on the commercial ecosystem around music—how people get into shows, what they wear and collect, and which platforms they use to make those purchases.
Broad lifestyle, fashion and wellness product coverage
Beyond music, Mikulski Ruiz writes extensively on general lifestyle and fashion shopping, often in list-based guides aimed at helping readers make concrete purchases. Her Rolling Stone archive includes pieces like “Amazon Alternatives: 21 Places to Shop Online Other Than Amazon,” which maps out other e-commerce sites by category, and a series of gift guides such as “The 50+ Best Father’s Day Gifts” built around curated product picks. She covers apparel and retail in depth, for example in “28 Men’s Clothing Stores Where Our…” which spotlights men’s fashion destinations and the kinds of occasions and styles they serve. Her health and wellness commerce work includes articles like “The 5 Best Creatine Supplements for Women, According to Experts,” where she summarises expert input, ingredients and pricing to help readers choose supplements. Professional profiles note that she covers fashion, beauty, lifestyle, tech, food, entertainment and drinks, underscoring that her remit stretches from wardrobe and grooming to kitchen tools and entertainment gadgets. Across these topics, she keeps the focus on practical details—price points, value, and how specific products fit into everyday routines.
Experience-focused service journalism and cross-outlet work
Mikulski Ruiz’s pieces are consistently framed as service journalism: they answer specific questions about how to watch something, where to shop or which products to consider, rather than offering opinion or criticism. Lists, comparison roundups and step-by-step guides are her default formats, whether she is outlining alternatives to a dominant retailer, explaining the best way to stream a marquee game, or curating merch for fans of a major artist. Her background includes commerce and lifestyle writing for national consumer publications such as Esquire, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping and Oprah Daily, extending her product-focused approach beyond Rolling Stone into broader culture and lifestyle outlets. More recently, she has signaled expanding work with fashion and music-industry publications, including contributing writing for titles like Women’s Wear Daily and Billboard alongside her ongoing Rolling Stone coverage. Across platforms, her through-line is the same: she translates cultural moments—music festivals, award shows, sporting events, seasonal milestones—into concrete shopping and streaming decisions for readers.
4 more music journalists.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling Murphy is the theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail. She stands out for writing about theatre as both art and infrastructure, with coverage that links new Canadian stage work, awards culture, and pop-inflected criticism. She covers theatre, music, and pop culture in a detailed, conversational style, moving between reviews, reported features, and analysis of the systems that shape what gets produced. Her beat includes the Dora Awards, Toronto stages, new writing, intimate productions, and smaller venues, as well as controversy where artistic decisions meet politics and community response. Before The Globe, she was senior editor of Intermission Magazine, and her bylines include The New York Times, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and the Baltimore Sun.
Alex Hudson
Alex Hudson is Editor-in-Chief of Exclaim! and leads coverage of music’s links to sports, literature, and technology, with a strong focus on Canadian artists. Hudson reports on how music intersects with other fields, not as a separate industry. Recent coverage has included Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer on how playing piano saved his career, Ottawa Bluesfest’s Canada-wide soccer watch party, Lakes of Canada’s Margaret Atwood-inspired album Transgressions, Hannah Mary McKinnon on The Beaches influencing her rock-themed novel, and Alexander Nilsson’s 1001 Albums Generator as a tool for broadening music discovery beyond algorithmic recommendations.
Allie Gregory
Allie Gregory maps how audiences encounter new music by tracking the practical pathways of releases, tours, festivals, platforms and projects. She is a managing editor and news writer at Exclaim!, where she is a primary editorial contact for forthcoming releases and news tips and helps shape the outlet’s daily agenda around new music and its broader entertainment context. Her reporting centres on timely album and tour announcements, live logistics and festival programming across indie, metal, country, pop and adjacent film and streaming news. She writes direct, information-heavy pieces that foreground calendars, support acts, set times and programming structures, while also producing longer-form interviews, cultural stories and staff-pick recommendations that connect artists’ work, controversy and creative campaigns to how audiences encounter music and entertainment on the road, at festivals and on screens.
Andrei Ionescu
Andrei Ionescu focuses on how science, technology and human perception intersect, using single studies to show how complex systems shape everyday experience. He is a staff writer for Earth, covering climate and biodiversity research, neuroscience, animal behavior and the cultural impact of technology. His music coverage treats songs as a window into memory, emotion and brain function. He reports on cognition, environment, AI and data, including biodiversity loss, Amazon forests, AI search tools, evolutionary AI, hidden climate extremes, air pollution, deep seafloor life, mass extinctions, toxic moths and animal culture. His work foregrounds mechanisms such as perception, memory and pattern recognition. He writes concise, tightly structured explainers that move from research question to method to findings, staying close to the data and using plain language with enough technical context to clarify how studies work.