Playground →
Two distinct audience neighborhoods define Mike Garafolo's similarity map, and they don't obviously belong together: NFL beat journalists on one side, and NHL media on the other.
The shape is two-peak. The top of the list is anchored by fellow football reporters — Albert Breer at 0.92, Peter King at 0.89, and Jayson Stark at 0.88 (a baseball journalist whose audience shape nonetheless lands in this cluster), alongside The MMQB at 0.87. These four form a tight band of sports journalism audiences. Then a second cluster emerges: Bob McKenzie at 0.86, Darren Dreger at 0.85, and Pierre LeBrun at 0.84 are all hockey-beat figures, joined by USA Hockey at 0.84 and NHL at 0.84. Peter Gammons at 0.86 sits between the two clusters by score, a baseball journalist whose audience bridges both neighborhoods.
All ten of the top neighbors are journalists (six), athletes (two), a website, or a sports league — no entertainers, no general-interest media. The audience is tightly composed around sports news consumers who follow both football transactions and hockey coverage, a cross-sport pairing that is the defining structural feature of this map.
That two-peak structure — NFL reporting on one side, NHL media on the other — suggests Garafolo's audience is drawn from a segment of sports fans who consume professional league news broadly, not just football.
