I read the Chronicle piece on pop culture scholarship & I was of 2 minds about it. The necessity and dearth of context in contemporary cultural criticism can’t be overstated & I felt like that was the main point the writers were making. But the gulf btw academic & non academic spaces is so wide for the reasons that you mentioned. I’m not sure that writers necessarily need to go through every journal article published on a pop culture topic so much as we need to commit ourselves to reading more non-fiction books about the societies & institutions that we cover. Like music writers should be reading nonfiction books about the histories of the genres they cover and books about the cultural histories of the people who are the primary producers of the genre they write about. For me the context is so often absent from mainstream pop culture writing that much of the work is rendered valueless and antagonistic.