Megan LaPierre
Megan LaPierre covers music and culture for Exclaim!, with a focus on how artists build and sustain careers across albums, tours and side projects. Her work stands out for tracking the full lifecycle of a release or artist story — from the first tease to record, book or film announcements, through touring plans and broader industry context.
Release news and artist projects
LaPierre’s core coverage follows the arc of new creative work from established and emerging musicians. She reports on major release announcements and artistic pivots, including stories on country icons branching into fiction, indie bandleaders taking on novel-writing, and veteran rock bands confirming new albums after long gaps between records. Her headlines frequently centre on the specific project — an album, novel, or concert film — and what it signals about an artist’s next phase, rather than just the basic news milestone.
Alongside marquee names, she gives space to mid-tier and independent acts whose new work is poised to shift their profile. Her coverage of anticipated Canadian albums and staff picks highlights artists on the brink of wider recognition and frames their releases in terms of creative evolution and momentum. This mix of household names and rising acts, treated with similar attention to detail, marks her as someone who maps the broader ecosystem rather than only chasing the most obvious headlines.
Tours, live circuits and festival coverage
A significant portion of LaPierre’s reporting documents how records and projects translate into live performance. She regularly writes about North American and international tours, from UK jazz collectives announcing Canadian dates to indie rock bands routing through Central Canada, as well as regional festivals that pull together genre-diverse lineups. Her stories tend to spell out where a tour fits in an artist’s current chapter and how it connects to their latest work, instead of simply listing dates.
She also highlights local concert calendars and themed roundups, such as guides to can’t-miss shows in specific cities, which knit together larger touring stories with the on-the-ground live scene. In these pieces, she balances marquee acts with smaller-venue performers, giving readers a sense of how different tiers of artists share the same stages and nights. The emphasis on routes, venues and festivals means touring strategy, not just new music, is a recurring frame in her work.
Crossing between music, film and comedy
Although her primary beat is music, LaPierre is a regular presence in Exclaim!’s film and comedy news archives, where she covers adaptations, screen projects and performers whose work moves between mediums. She reports on film awards, literary figures with screen ties, and major comedy festivals, drawing links between the creative communities that occupy different sections of the site. This cross-vertical coverage keeps her close to artists whose careers span records, books, television and live performance.
Her film and comedy stories often focus on the business and reputational stakes of projects and events — who is headlining, which productions are drawing awards attention, and how festival bills position performers. The result is a portfolio where music remains central, but the surrounding entertainment landscape is part of the same narrative, useful for stories that touch multiple cultural sectors at once.
Critical voice, staff selections and scene context
Beyond straight news, LaPierre contributes staff picks, gift guides and opinion-driven features that sharpen her critical perspective on artists and the industry. In pieces spotlighting specific albums, she writes in the first person about songwriting, performance and the feel of a record, offering evaluative language and narrative detail instead of chart metrics or hype alone. Her holiday and gear-focused guides combine practical recommendations with an ear for how tools and accessories serve working and aspiring musicians.
She has also written more reflective, meta-industry pieces on album campaigns and marketing, examining how promotion shapes audience perception and media coverage. These features show her willingness to interrogate the machinery around music, not just the output, and to bring a slightly sardonic tone when a story calls for it. Together with her regular news files, they position her as a reporter who can toggle between service writing, criticism and industry analysis while staying grounded in concrete examples drawn from current releases and tours.
Handling sensitive stories and reputational stakes
LaPierre occasionally covers allegations and public statements involving high-profile figures in adjacent creative fields, treating them as part of the broader cultural environment in which artists operate. In those pieces, she summarises claims, responses and available evidence with careful attribution, maintaining a neutral news voice around reputationally charged material. This ability to handle sensitive narratives alongside standard release and tour coverage underscores her range and comfort reporting across the full spectrum of culture news.
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.
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.