Resources

Most of the questions that come up around radio have been answered somewhere public. The hard part is knowing where to look. This page is a short reference shelf of the primary and trade sources the publication draws on, aimed at readers who want to cross-check a claim, research a station, or go deeper into a policy question than any editorial piece has room for. The list is short on purpose. A twenty-link resource page is a bookmarks folder, not a reading list.

Primary and authority sources

Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is the licensing and rulemaking body for all U.S. broadcast radio. Station databases, rule text, public notices, and filing windows all live here, and the LPFM service rules are published in full on the site. For any question about legal status, ownership, or technical parameters of a U.S. station, this is the first stop. fcc.gov

National Federation of Community Broadcasters. NFCB is the oldest trade organization specifically serving community radio in the United States. It publishes practical guidance on station operations, finances, and governance, and it has been a consistent voice in LPFM policy for decades. nfcb.org

Public Radio Exchange. PRX is a distribution platform and production house for public radio programming, and it operates a substantial catalog of shows used by stations that do not run a full NPR slate. The organization is also closely involved with podcasting infrastructure. prx.org

Radio World. Radio World is a long-running trade publication covering the engineering and business side of broadcast radio. It is the best day-to-day source for station sales, technical developments, regulatory news, and transmitter-level reporting. radioworld.com

Current. Current covers public and noncommercial radio and television news in the United States. For reporting on station management changes, CPB funding debates, and public media labor issues, it has been the reference publication for decades. current.org

NPR. The NPR public editor, corrections page, and internal ethics handbook are all publicly accessible, and the network's coverage of the broader media environment frequently includes reporting on the state of radio itself. npr.org

How to use this list

For a policy question (license classes, LPFM technical limits, ownership caps, emergency alert system rules), start at the FCC. For an operational question about running or starting a community station, NFCB and the LPFM material at the FCC together cover most of the ground. For trade news and engineering developments, Radio World is the day-to-day read. For public radio specifically, Current and PRX each cover different sides of the same world. None of these sources pay for placement here, and the publication has no affiliation with any of them.

A short note on what is deliberately missing. The list does not include social media accounts, aggregator sites, or hobbyist wikis, not because those are without value but because they turn over too fast to be worth recommending in a reference format. It also does not include commercial equipment vendors or consulting firms. Readers looking for gear recommendations or engineering services will find those elsewhere, and keeping them out of the resources page is part of how this publication stays independent.

Internal reading

If you are new to the publication, the articles below are the ones readers return to most often. They also double as a reasonable sequence for building background on the subjects the site covers.