Community Broadcasting

The FCC established the Low Power FM service in January 2000 after years of pressure from microradio operators, church groups, and community organizers who wanted an actual path to a legal license. The rules capped LPFM stations at 100 watts effective radiated power, restricted them to noncommercial educational use, and required local ownership. That single rulemaking is the reason there are now thousands of small volunteer-run stations on the U.S. FM dial, sitting between the full-power class A signals, carrying everything from bilingual community news to block programming run entirely by teenagers. Community broadcasting, in the sense we use it here, mostly lives inside that frame.

What community broadcasting actually is

"Community radio" gets used loosely. For this publication the term means a noncommercial station that is locally owned, locally programmed, and primarily run by volunteers or a very small paid staff accountable to a local board. That is not the same as public radio, which in the U.S. usually means a larger NPR or PRX affiliate with professional staff and a mix of national and local programming. It is also not the same as public-access television's radio equivalent, because community radio stations hold their own FCC licenses and bear legal responsibility for what goes out over the transmitter.

The LPFM service is the cleanest example, but it is not the only one. There are full-power noncommercial educational FM stations, class A full-power stations owned by small nonprofits, and a handful of AM outlets operated on a community basis. What ties them together is governance and intent, not wattage. A 6,000-watt NCE FM run by a community board is more "community radio" than a 100-watt LPFM that is quietly functioning as a remote satellite for a syndicated religious network.

The distance from public radio

It is worth being specific about the difference from NPR-affiliated public radio. A large public station in a metro area might have fifty employees, a music director, a news desk, and a programming grid built around national carriage from NPR, PRX, and APM. A community LPFM in the same city might have two part-time coordinators, a transmitter in a closet, and a schedule built from twenty-five volunteer shows running two hours each. The two do different jobs. Public radio aggregates audience for national work. Community radio uses the license as a platform for local voices that would not otherwise get on any air at all. Both are useful. They are not interchangeable, and readers who conflate them miss most of what community broadcasting is trying to do.

Articles in Community Broadcasting

If you are new to the subject, the LPFM history piece is the best entry point. The volunteer culture essay explains the social machinery that keeps these stations running once the transmitter is on, and the public access comparison is there to clear up a confusion that comes up constantly in online discussion. The starting a station piece is the longest of the four and assumes you actually want to try.

One last note on scope. The Local Community Radio Act of 2010, signed into law in early 2011, expanded LPFM eligibility in urban markets by loosening the third-adjacent channel protection rules that had kept the service largely rural during its first decade. The 2013 LPFM filing window that followed was the largest the FCC has ever run, and a substantial share of the community stations on the air today came out of that window. Any serious writing about community broadcasting in the United States has to account for that shift, and most of the articles in this section do.