Playground →
Up First's ten nearest neighbors contain no other podcasts or radio programs — the top 10 is split across news publishers, journalists, websites, comedians, and TV personalities, with scores bunched tightly between 0.92 and 0.95. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition; the narrow band across these ten reflects a flat shape with no single dominant pull.
AP Stylebook leads at 0.95, followed by AP Politics at 0.93 — both news publishers, and both from the same wire-service family. Journalists make up the next largest cluster: Tamara Keith (0.92), Audie Cornish (0.92), and Ari Shapiro (0.92) all sit within a point of each other. Websites round out the set — AP Oddities (0.93), Merriam-Webster (0.92), and PolitiFact (0.92) — alongside two comedians: John Mulaney (0.93) and TV personality Jonathan Van Ness (0.93).
The cross-kind character of this cluster is the defining feature: the audience Up First draws overlaps most with people who follow wire-service journalism, individual NPR correspondents, fact-checking sites, and comedians — not, in the top 10, other podcast or radio programs.
This pattern suggests an audience defined less by the podcast format itself and more by a consistent orientation toward news literacy, public-media journalism, and a specific cultural sensibility that extends into comedy and personality-driven content.
