Playground →
USA Today's top 10 nearest neighbors are a tightly packed cluster of mainstream news and broadcast media — no single entity pulls far ahead of the rest, and the scores compress into a narrow band from 0.92 down to 0.87.
The shape is flat: CBS News (0.92) and NBC News (0.92) sit at the top, separated by less than a point, followed closely by MSNBC (0.91) and Beth Doane (0.90), an author whose presence in this otherwise broadcast-heavy cluster is the one outlier worth noting. CBS This Morning (0.90) and World News Tonight (0.89) round out the upper tier, with Newsweek (0.89) and Men's Health Mag (0.88) adding magazine representation. CNN Breaking News (0.88) and CBS Breaking News (0.87) close the set.
Tallying by subcategory: four of the ten neighbors are News Publishers, three are TV Shows, one is a TV Channel, and two are Magazines — with Beth Doane (Authors) as the sole non-media entity. USA Today's own subcategory, News Publishers, is well-represented, but the audience shape extends meaningfully into broadcast TV formats and general-interest print. The cross-kind presence of magazines — particularly a health title like Men's Health — suggests the audience composition reaches beyond hard-news consumers into broader lifestyle readership.
The flat shape, with no dominant neighbor and no structural gap, points to an audience that is genuinely mainstream: it overlaps evenly across the established broadcast and print news ecosystem rather than clustering tightly around any single outlet or format.
