Playground →
The top 10 neighbors for The Upshot form a remarkably uniform cluster — scores run from 0.99 down to only 0.99, a band so compressed it offers no single standout. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition; the narrow range across all ten positions is itself the structural finding.
Eight of the ten neighbors are journalists — Matthew Yglesias (0.99), Michael Barbaro (0.99), Rukmini Callimachi (0.99), Jay Rosen (0.99), Nate Cohn (0.99), Dave Weigel (0.99), Ezra Klein (0.99), and Ben Smith (0.99). The remaining two are Nieman Lab, a website at 0.99, and The Atlantic, a magazine at 0.99. No other news publishers appear in the top 10 — the center entity's own subcategory is absent from the set — and the journalist subcategory dominates by a wide margin. The cross-kind pattern is notable: The Upshot's nearest audiences are shaped almost entirely by individual journalists rather than by other news publications.
The flat shape and journalist-heavy composition together suggest an audience defined less by institutional brand loyalty than by a specific professional and intellectual orbit — one that follows bylines as readily as mastheads.
