Cleveland station ending sponsored talk show

Tegna’s WKYC in Cleveland, Ohio, is canceling its sponsored lifestyle talk show “Good Company” as part of a larger restructuring of the marketing teams within the group.

The station announced the show will end in mid-January 2025, ending a nearly 20-year run that started in 2005. 

The move is connected to the previously announced plan to restructure Tegna’s local marketing teams into regional hubs. It will result in some jobs being eliminated at WKYC. However, the exact number was not immediately clear (Tegna is also planning a broader swath of layoffs at its other stations across the country).

“Good Company” is mostly filled with advertiser-sponsored segments and hosted by Katherine Boyd and Joe Cronauer. It currently occupies the noon timeslot at the station. There’s no word on what will replace it and if the slot will remain locally-produced.

Shows like this have been a popular way for local stations to offer advertising partners an alternative way of marketing their products and services to consumers. Advertisers typically pay the station for individual segments or as part of a larger ad buy in exchange for spotlighting themselves in a format that feels like a talk show.

Historically, these shows are often comparatively inexpensive to produce and, even with only mediocre ratings, can still do quite well, though the exact economics of WKYC’s “Good Company” were announced.

However, with linear audiences shrinking across the board, these programs will likely face a more challenging environment. 

Large cuts at broadcasters have been widely expected as 2024 wraps up and 2025 dawns. Broadcasters are facing general economic uncertainty and rising costs, just like most other industries, combined with shrinking traditional audiences and a year without significant election dollars in most areas. Not having any Olympics broadcasts may also prove to be a challenge for NBC and its affiliates, including WKYC.

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Like many broadcasters, Tegna was enjoying a relatively strong 2024, thanks largely to political ad dollars connected to the 2024 presidential election and, for NBC stations, Olympics ad revenue, but future financial forecasts are mixed for many media outlets.