Playground →
Two Chicago-specific magazines sit at the very top of the similarity graph — Time Out Chicago at 0.99 and Chicago Magazine at 0.99 — but the second distinct cluster pulling on this audience is local political figures, not other publications.
The shape here is genuinely two-peaked. The first peak is same-kind: Time Out Chicago (0.99) and Chicago Magazine (0.99) are fellow magazines covering the same city, and their audience compositions track almost identically with the Chicago Reader's. The second peak is political: Mayor Lori Lightfoot (0.98) and Governor JB Pritzker (0.95) rank third and fourth, scoring well above the rest of the field. That pairing suggests the audience carries a strong civic orientation that is distinct from the editorial-overlap explanation driving the magazine cluster. Below those two peaks, the neighbors spread across a range of subcategories: Mariano's (0.93) as a Grocery and Superstores brand, WGN Morning News (0.91) as a TV Show, The Second City (0.87) as a Destination, Rick Bayless (0.87) as a TV Personality, Grubhub (0.87) as a Restaurant brand, and Threadless (0.85) in Fashion — all Chicago-rooted or Chicago-adjacent entities. No sports, no national news publishers, and no streaming services appear in the top 10.
The overall picture is an audience defined by two gravitational centers: city-specific media and local civic life, with a secondary layer of Chicago-identified consumer brands filling out the lower tier.
