Playground →
Two Chicago-specific magazines sit at the very top of Time Out Chicago's neighbor set — and then the audience bridges sharply into local politics. Chicago Magazine (0.99) and Chicago Reader (0.99) are nearly indistinguishable from Time Out Chicago by audience shape, forming a tight cluster of city-focused print and digital magazines. That's the first peak. The second is a pair of Illinois politicians: Mayor Lori Lightfoot (0.98) and Governor JB Pritzker (0.96), whose audiences overlap with this one at a level that outpaces most of the remaining neighbors by a meaningful margin.
Below those four, the top 10 fans out across Chicago-rooted brands and local media. Mariano's (0.94) — a grocery chain — sits fifth, followed by WGN Morning News (0.90), a local TV show. Rick Bayless (0.88), a TV personality, and The Second City (0.87), a Destinations brand, continue the local-Chicago thread. Grubhub (0.84) and ComEd (0.83) round out the ten — a food delivery service and a utility brand, both with strong Chicago footprints. The subcategory mix across the top 10 spans magazines, politicians, grocery, TV shows, TV personalities, destinations, restaurant, and utility — but the unifying thread is not category; it's geography. Every neighbor in the top 10 is either Chicago-based or Chicago-dominant in its audience.
The two-peak structure — fellow city magazines at near-perfect overlap, then local politicians just behind — signals an audience defined less by content format than by civic identity.
