Sydney Brasil
Sydney Brasil covers music and entertainment with a sharp focus on how artists, fandoms and online culture intersect, bringing a social editor’s eye for what will move through feeds into the news wire of Exclaim!. She works as a social editor at the masthead and a music and culture journalist, combining fast-turn news about releases and tours with stories that trace how musicians navigate their relationships with audiences in public and online spaces. Her coverage moves easily between guitar lifers, internet-era pop‑punk, cult film franchises and offbeat cultural stories, treating each with the same clear, news‑driven style.
Johnny Marr and guitar lifer stories
In her reporting on Johnny Marr’s album The Age of Everything, Brasil tracks the details of the release while framing Marr within a long lineage of working musicians who continue to evolve. She uses this kind of album announcement to situate a veteran guitarist in the present tense, focusing on concrete information — titles, timelines, collaborators, sonic direction — rather than nostalgia, which makes the piece useful both to longtime fans and to readers scanning for new music to enter their rotation. That interest in established artists carries through to her coverage of Don Pyle’s Rough Description and its Standard Time book launch party, where she highlights Pyle’s combined careers as musician, photographer and author alongside the specifics of the event. Across these stories, she treats multi‑decade careers as active and current, emphasizing what is happening now — a new record, a launch party, a fresh project — and anchoring it in the wider culture around guitar‑driven music.
Hayley Williams and online fan culture
Brasil’s piece on Hayley Williams’s response to Alex Reads Tarot shows how she uses music stories to dissect everyday internet drama and fan interactions. Rather than focusing only on Williams’s celebrity, she follows the chain of events around a tarot reading, a public response and the expectations fans place on artists in semi‑private online spaces, turning a niche incident into a case study in how musicians manage boundaries with their audience. The headline explicitly casts Williams’s reply as “an example for all celebrities,” and the coverage works in that vein — describing what happened, quoting the key posts, and then drawing out what it says about power, responsibility and etiquette on social platforms from the point of view of someone who works inside them. This blend of music reporting and internet‑culture analysis stands out in her body of work and reflects the social‑first lens she brings to Exclaim!’s daily news stream.
Shrek, Pinback and wider entertainment news
Alongside musician‑focused stories, Brasil contributes to the masthead’s wider entertainment beat, including film, animation and live‑music news. Her article on the trailer for Shrek 5, under the headline “Shrek and Donkey Go Further, Further Away in ‘Shrek 5’ Trailer,” treats the return of the franchise as news rather than pure nostalgia, summarizing the new installment, the footage and the creative direction while nodding to the meme‑heavy afterlife of the earlier films. On the live‑music side, she covers tour logistics and health realities in stories like “Pinback Cancel Remaining Tour Dates Due to Rob Crow’s Tinnitus,” where the emphasis falls on the practical impact of an artist’s medical condition on fans’ plans and the band’s schedule. She also writes more offbeat culture pieces, such as “Adult DVD Clean Up with ‘Cowboy on Aisle Three,’” signalling a willingness to follow strange or humorous corners of entertainment when they intersect with the masthead’s remit. Taken together, these headlines show her as a reliable hand for quick, factual coverage of breaking news across film, comedy and music, with an eye for how those stories will resonate in internet culture.
Beyond the masthead
Outside her work as social editor at Exclaim!, Brasil identifies as a music and culture journalist whose writing appears in multiple outlets. She notes that her words have been published in the Toronto Star and Complex, extending her focus on music and culture beyond the masthead’s audience and into more general‑interest and lifestyle readerships. Her byline is attached to a Spring 2025 cover story on DJO (Joe Keery) for another publication, where she sits the artist at the centre of a broader issue that also features figures like Lucy Dacus, showing that she can expand from short news items into longer, narrative‑driven profiles when the assignment calls for it. Across these roles, she keeps her subject matter consistent — contemporary music, its adjacent culture and the way those worlds play out both offline and online — but shifts format, from feed‑ready headlines to magazine‑style cover features.
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.