Johnston, who has written about music for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and other publications, believes that the pressure to increase web traffic causes major music publications to churn out sensationalist outrage pieces and “celebrity coverage” of popular artists, a development she compared to “when your bagel shop starts selling frozen yogurt.” […]Johnston said she personally struggles with this trend in content creation because her interest in writing about new, unhyped artists is less profitable for publications compared to pieces covering mainstays who are “guaranteed clicks.” When Johnston wrote for The Village Voice and the pop music website Idolator, “the things that were like ‘Hey, this is a cool band…’ would never get as much traffic as a list of something or [a piece] pointing out something is bad,” she said. - ajr.org