Allie Gregory
Allie Gregory maps how audiences encounter new music, focusing on the moving parts of releases, tours and festivals for Exclaim! as a managing editor and news writer. Her coverage centres on timely announcements and live logistics, giving clear details about when records arrive, where artists are playing and how festival programming is structured. She works across genres and formats, from indie and metal to country and pop, while also touching adjacent film and streaming news when it intersects with music culture. As a primary editorial contact for forthcoming releases and news tips, she helps shape the outlet’s daily agenda around new music and its broader entertainment context.
Album and tour announcements
Gregory’s day-to-day reporting revolves around new albums and the tours built around them. She covers stories like Squirrel Flower’s announcement of the album Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going alongside a plotted North American tour, highlighting both the release and live plans in a single piece. Her music news archive includes items such as Little Big Town taking their album It’s a Dying Art on a North American tour, with attention to dates and regions that show how the record will be brought to audiences on the road. She reports on metal outfits like Pallbearer expanding a North American tour, and pop-adjacent acts such as Lilyisthatyou returning with a new single and announcing 2026 tour dates, reflecting a consistent focus on the calendar of live shows that accompanies new material.
Across these announcements, Gregory’s format is direct and information-heavy: she foregrounds tour expansions, support acts and timing, and pairs them with concise context about the artist’s current phase. The headlines themselves emphasise action — plotting a tour, expanding dates, returning with new singles — which fits the way she frames stories around what is changing in an artist’s schedule rather than static biography. This makes her coverage especially keyed to moments when artists move from studio to stage, giving clear entry points for stories tied to new campaigns, road activity or comeback cycles.
Festival and live programming
Gregory also covers festival ecosystems and curated showcases, often focusing on how multi-artist events are assembled. Her work includes pieces on Lawnya Vawnya’s “sweet 16th” instalment, where she notes headliners like Slash Need, ÉBONY, Narcy, Fiver with the Fiver Trois and G̱a̱mksimoon, while outlining the dates and downtown setting. She writes about Dawson City Music Fest programming, and Exclaim!-presented showcases at Wintersong Music Festival led by artists such as Bibi Club, Devin Cuddy, Altered by Mom and MOONRIIVR. In the Wintersong coverage, she goes as far as listing venue names and set times, from Noise Hotel’s early slot to Featurette’s afterparty, showing a granular approach to live scheduling.
Her festival reporting extends to larger-brand events featuring artists like Lorde, Kesha, Wet Leg and the Beaches, situating their appearances within specific multi-day lineups. She regularly spotlights Canadian and independent acts in these contexts, including fanclubwallet and Kiwi Jr., alongside emerging names tapped for future editions of key festivals. Taken together, this body of work shows Gregory using festival news to track how scenes cohere around lineups, giving readers a clear picture of who is sharing stages, under what banner and at what point in the year.
Artists beyond the studio and cultural stories
Beyond tours and festivals, Gregory follows the ways musicians and cultural figures extend their work into other mediums and public conversations. In her coverage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, she reports on the artist authoring the children’s book Hey Little Rockabye, noting how the Ben Hodson–illustrated picture book champions animal rescue and pet adoption. She has written about Margaret Atwood being accused of transphobia on Twitter, engaging with the intersection of literary figures, social media and film coverage within Exclaim!’s entertainment remit. These pieces show her willingness to cover stories where cultural impact and controversy sit alongside creative output, not only traditional release cycles.
Gregory also works in longer-form formats, including a notable interview with Sufjan Stevens in which she explores his ascent from the “chaos of modern America.” That feature reflects a different register from her short news posts, giving space to an artist’s worldview and the political and social context around their work. Elsewhere, staff pick features highlight tracks like Cartel Madras’s “EVIDENT 2 ME” and Brian Jordan Alvarez’s “Sitting,” underscoring her role as an active listener who brings personal enthusiasm into curated recommendations alongside her reporting. This mix of news, features and curated listening notes positions her as someone who covers both the logistics of music and its emotional and cultural charge.
Film, streaming and entertainment news
While music is her primary beat, Gregory contributes to Exclaim!’s broader entertainment coverage, including film and streaming news. Her archive features pieces like “Here’s What’s Coming to Paramount+ in February 2026,” which outline upcoming titles on the platform and keep readers updated on changes to the streaming landscape. This sits alongside Exclaim!’s positioning as “Canada’s authority on music, film and entertainment,” and shows her participating in coverage that tracks how audiences can access culture not only in venues but on screens.
In practice, this means Gregory can write across adjacent verticals when music, film and streaming intersect, bridging artist-focused stories with announcements about where work will live and how it will be distributed. Her role as a key contact for news submissions on forthcoming releases reinforces that she is embedded in these flows of information, connecting labels, artists and publicists with Exclaim!’s readers through clear, time-sensitive coverage. This combination of responsibilities and output defines her as a journalist whose distinguishing trait is an ability to track the practical pathways — tours, festivals, platforms and projects — through which contemporary music and entertainment reach the public.
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.
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz is a commerce writer whose distinct focus is the buying and streaming side of music, entertainment and lifestyle, helping readers decide how to watch major events and what to purchase around them. She is an e-commerce specialist at Rolling Stone, covering products, platforms and deals tied to award shows, festivals, sports and everyday culture. Her beat blends music streaming guides with shopping and product recommendations across fashion, beauty, tech, food, wellness and drinks. She reports through experience-focused service journalism, using lists, comparison roundups and step-by-step guides to answer concrete questions about how to stream major cultural moments, where to shop and which products to choose. Her background includes commerce and lifestyle writing for consumer publications such as Esquire, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Women’s Wear Daily and Billboard.
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.