Becca Monaghan
Becca Monaghan connects music fandom with wider lifestyle and culture trends, using pop artists and their communities as a way to explain how people live, feel, and spend their time. She writes for BuzzFeed’s music vertical while working across trends coverage, focusing on the crossover between entertainment, beauty, travel, and online culture.
Pop fandom and artist narratives
Much of Monaghan’s music coverage centres on pop artists and the dynamics between them and their fans. In her piece on KATSEYE’s interview about Manon’s hiatus, she breaks down not just what was said but how the news lands inside an already engaged fandom, foregrounding group dynamics, loyalty, and expectation management around a member stepping back from the spotlight. Her music stories frequently link individual artist updates, releases, and career turns with the emotions and conversations unfolding among fans online, so the reporting is as much about community reaction as it is about the artists themselves. This approach makes her a fit for stories where artist news intersects with fandom culture, social media discourse, or shifting norms in how musicians communicate with their audiences.
Music as part of lifestyle, beauty, and wellness trends
Monaghan’s author bio describes her as a Trends Editor at BuzzFeed, covering “the latest in lifestyle, culture and travel” and spotlighting “the moments that shape how we live, work, and connect.” That wider remit carries through into her music-related work, where artists and songs are routinely placed inside larger lifestyle conversations. For example, she has written on beauty and self-presentation, including a feature on learning how to make curls last that frames hair care as part of everyday confidence and routine rather than a pure styling tutorial. She also covers emerging wellness and culture trends such as sober curiosity, showing how younger audiences rethink alcohol and health, and situating that shift alongside other choices about how people spend nights out, attend gigs, and engage with social life. Across these stories, music sits alongside beauty, wellness, and travel as one strand of a broader lived experience, and her reporting connects these domains rather than treating them as separate beats.
Culture, travel, and online moments
Beyond strictly music pieces, Monaghan’s trends work looks at how culture, travel, and digital behaviour intersect. As Trends Editor, she highlights specific “moments” that illustrate changing habits or attitudes, whether that is a new way people approach trips, a beauty product that reshapes routines, or a social media exchange that captures a political or cultural shift. Her coverage often uses concrete examples—named destinations, particular products, viral posts or interviews—to anchor explanations of larger trends, then draws out what those examples say about how people work, relax, and relate to one another. This makes her music coverage more contextual: tour locations, festival choices, and online fan spaces can be treated as travel and culture subjects as much as entertainment topics, which broadens the framing of potential stories.
Format and tone
Monaghan’s BuzzFeed output combines reported features with service pieces that give readers something practical to take away, especially in beauty and lifestyle. Headlines signal clear value or a specific narrative hook, whether she is explaining a new wellness trend, unpacking a fan conversation around a pop group, or sharing a technique that simplifies hair care. The tone is accessible and conversational while remaining focused on concrete detail: she summarises what was said in interviews, what changed in a routine or product use, and what behaviour is visible across a trend, then uses that detail to make broader points about culture and everyday life. For music-related stories, this translates to pieces that balance artist news with fan context, practical implications for how people engage with music, and an emphasis on the lived experience around songs and performers.
4 more music journalists.
Abby Webster
Abby Webster zeroes in on the storytelling side of contemporary pop, writing for Billboard about how songs build worlds around K-pop groups, fictional pop stars and ambitious soundtracks. She covers K-pop projects through close, song-by-song features, like her track-by-track piece with SEVENTEEN’s Vernon and The 8 on their EP ‘V8,’ and fan-centered lists such as “7 Best Moments from BTS’ Long-Awaited Return.” She treats soundtracks and fictional acts with the same rigor, mapping the inspirations behind “The Vampire Lestat” soundtrack and profiling in-universe groups like HUNTR/X and Saja Boys as if they were chart acts. Through Chart Beat stories on projects like “KPop Demon Hunters,” she connects these releases to industry strategy, global fandom, and the business systems that turn pop narratives into durable IP.
Alex Suskind
Alex Suskind is a freelance writer and editor who covers music with concise news stories and curated release lists. He focuses on new songs, album roundups, and archival access, from Carly Rae Jepsen’s “On Wires” to Neil Young opening his full catalog to residents of Greenland. His reporting stays close to the release cycle and foregrounds the core hook of each story. He has written for Pitchfork and has freelance work in Vulture, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. He also covers broader arts and culture, but his music beat is built around what is newly out now or newly available.
Ali Shutler
Ali Shutler links chart pop, alternative music and fan culture with the ways songs move through festivals, streaming platforms and games. He is a freelance culture journalist specialising in music, writing news and features for NME and other music and culture titles. He covers breakout chart acts, legacy artists whose catalogues are resurfacing, and how audiences rediscover songs via TikTok, streaming or in‑game soundtracks. His reporting on streaming-era pop and live festival moments tracks virality, catalog access and fan behaviour as part of the story of a track. He also examines music, gaming and visual art crossovers, treating game soundtracks and artist-led campaigns as part of a wider cultural map. Alongside this, he profiles emerging chart artists for outlets including The Telegraph, Vice, The Independent, Dork and Upset, focusing on early-career trajectories and fan culture.
Annette Sharp
Annette Sharp is a veteran gossip and entertainment columnist known for direct, opinion-led coverage of celebrity power struggles and reputational crises across television and the music industry. She now writes high-profile columns for the masthead, after a decade on a well-read gossip column and a move to News Corp in 2008. Her real beat is the friction between public image and behind-the-scenes behaviour on flagship TV programs, including breakfast shows, reality formats and other long-running franchises. She focuses on who drives conflicts, who is exposed and who benefits, using ratings history, production decisions and industry mechanics as context. Sharp covers on-air personalities, executives, advisers and musicians, treating television and music as workplaces with competing egos, contracts and alliances, and blending reporting, media commentary and critique in a narrative column format.