POLITICO Playbook

Six of POLITICO Playbook's ten nearest neighbors are individual journalists — a composition that holds across a narrow similarity band running from 0.96 to 0.97, with no single neighbor pulling clearly ahead of the rest. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in shape; the flat distribution means the top 10 form a coherent cluster rather than a hierarchy.

Mike Allen leads at 0.97, followed closely by Seung Min Kim (0.96), Alex Burns (0.96), Jake Sherman (0.96), Jonathan Martin (0.96), and Ryan Lizza (0.96) — all classified as Journalists. The remaining four slots go to Morning Consult (0.97) and Monkey Cage (0.96), both Blogs; National Journal (0.97), the only other News Publisher in the top 10; and Brookings Institute (0.96), a Research Organization. The center entity's own subcategory — News Publishers — appears just once in the top 10, meaning the audience shape Playbook shares most strongly is with individual political journalists and policy-adjacent publications rather than with news outlets as a class.

That pattern points to an audience defined less by news consumption broadly and more by the specific professional and insider-political media ecosystem that individual bylines and policy research organizations occupy.