About Citizens Radio Review

Citizens Radio Review is an independent magazine, written in English for an American audience, devoted to community radio and low-power FM. We cover the stations themselves, the road a founding group travels to put a licensed signal on the air, the FCC rules translated into plain sentences, the history of citizen broadcasting from Armstrong’s FM to the Local Community Radio Act, the podcast afterlife of community programming, and the part small stations play in emergency alerts. The magazine lives at citizensradio.org and belongs to the network of readers and volunteers it is written for.

How we work

Every number on this site is a real figure from public life: the 100-watt power ceiling of the LPFM service, the 92.1 to 107.9 MHz band it occupies, the October 2013 filing window and its thousands of applications, the frequencies of the NOAA weather channels. When a fact is approximate, we write approximately. When a rule has a reason, we print the reason next to it. The method is stated in full in our editorial policy, and the LPFM roadmap shows it applied to the longest story we cover.

What we are not

We are not a broadcaster, we hold no license, and we do not speak for the Federal Communications Commission or for any station we describe. We accept clearly labelled sponsored placements under the rules published on the sponsored content page, never inside a guide’s numbers. To reach the desk, use the contact page. The reading of these pages is governed by the terms page, and visitor data is handled under the privacy page.