The National's nearest audiences are podcasts, journalists, and comedians — not other news publishers. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition; a score near 1.0 indicates near-identical audience shape.

The shape is flat: the top 10 neighbors fall within a tight band from 0.97 to 0.96, with no single dominant pull. Four of the ten are podcasts — Serial (0.97), This American Life (0.97), All Songs Considered (0.97), and Radiolab (0.97) — forming the densest cluster. Two journalists follow: Ira Glass (0.96) and Sam Sanders (0.96). Two comedians round out the set: Marc Maron (0.96) and Billy Eichner (0.96). Defector (0.96), a blog, and NPR Music (0.96) complete the ten. NPR Music is the only other News Publisher in the top 10; the rest of the neighbor set is drawn from adjacent but structurally distinct kinds of media and public figures.

The overall picture is an audience that moves fluidly across public-radio podcasts, longform journalism, and a specific strain of literary comedy — a coherent cultural cluster that doesn't map neatly onto any single media category.