Glenn Garner
Glenn Garner covers music and entertainment for Deadline with a consistent lens on LGBTQ culture, pop icons and how creative communities respond to social change. He is a writer, editor and photographer with a stated passion for LGBTQ entertainment and pop culture, and he joined the masthead in May 2024. His work stands out for treating celebrity and genre coverage as culture reporting, tying artists, drag performers and reality stars back to questions of representation, technology and community. Across outlets, he brings a queer-focused, fan-literate voice that looks beyond headlines to the people and politics behind them.
LGBTQ entertainment and drag culture
Glenn’s core focus is LGBTQ entertainment and pop culture, and that emphasis shapes his music and broader arts coverage at Deadline. He comes to this beat with experience at Out, where he fronted video segments and news packages centered on drag and queer performers. In a Boulet Brothers Halloween video, he introduces himself as Out’s resident “drag hag” while hosting a conversation with the horror drag duo, underscoring both subject-matter fluency and ease on camera.
His current work continues that line, giving space to queer creators and cult figures within mainstream entertainment. A social post highlighting “more wisdom from my Gregg Araki interview for Deadline” shows him engaging directly with a filmmaker whose work is foundational to queer cinema and alternative youth culture. That mix of drag, queer TV and film, and pop-culture icons reflects a beat that treats LGBTQ stories as central rather than niche, and positions Glenn to surface angles that a general entertainment reporter might miss.
Professional profiles describe him as a contributor, photographer and producer whose work sits squarely in arts and entertainment. Combined with his LGBTQ focus, that background gives him the tools to move between formats — written features, interviews, and multimedia segments — while keeping queer audiences and representation at the center of the coverage. For communications teams, this means that projects involving drag, queer artists or LGBTQ-led productions align naturally with the way he already frames stories.
Music, pop icons and technology’s impact on art
On the music beat, Glenn writes about artists not just as entertainers but as voices in ongoing debates around technology and creativity. One recent piece reports on Madonna describing artificial intelligence as the “opposite of making art” and sharing her preference for “connecting to nature,” a story that sits at the intersection of pop stardom, AI ethics and the value of human-made music. By foregrounding the artist’s philosophy about creation, he turns a news hook into a broader look at how technology is reshaping the conversation around art.
His social and professional profiles link his bylines across Deadline, People and Out, indicating a history of covering celebrity-driven stories and music-adjacent pop culture for major consumer outlets. That experience shows in his approach: he writes about stars as cultural figures whose comments on AI, nature and artistry resonate far beyond fan circles. His focus on queer entertainment further colors this work, putting particular weight on how LGBTQ communities might be affected by shifts in creative technology and industry practices.
Glenn’s combined identity as writer, editor and photographer also shapes his treatment of music subjects. Visual storytelling — from performance photography to drag and concert imagery — is part of his toolkit, and it supports written coverage that often leans into aesthetic and performative aspects of artists’ work. For campaigns built around pop musicians, queer performers or music experiences, he is positioned to connect the artistic message to wider debates about what “authentic” art-making looks like in an AI-driven era.
Reality television, representation and social issues
Beyond music and drag, Glenn writes about how reality television engages with marginalized communities, especially neurodivergent and autistic people. A recent piece covers reactions in the neurodivergent community to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments on autism, centering voices from Love on the Spectrum stars Dani Bowman and James B. That story ties dating reality TV to public-health discourse and advocacy, treating participants as subject-matter voices rather than just entertainment personalities.
His archive also includes coverage that connects late-night comedy to policy and civil liberties. One article examines John Oliver’s concern over the Trump administration’s deportation of alleged criminals without due process, using the show’s segment as an entry point into a deeper conversation about immigration and justice. Together, these stories show a reporter who uses entertainment formats — reality romance, comedy, celebrity commentary — to surface social and political issues, with particular attention to communities whose experiences are often flattened or ignored.
Across these threads, Glenn’s work is defined by a through-line: he treats LGBTQ people, neurodivergent individuals and other marginalized groups as central subjects of the entertainment beat, not side notes. Whether the story starts with a drag Halloween special, a Madonna quote about AI, or a reality dating show cast, he consistently looks for the underlying questions of representation, rights and cultural change. That perspective is what differentiates his coverage from more generic music and entertainment reporting.
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.