The U.S. Congress recently passed the Local Community Radio Act of
2010, which will expand the number of low-power FM stations by reducing
the required minimum spacing between them and full-power stations.
As it worked its way through Congress, the technical requirements
for the separation were tweaked and the bill eventually gained the
support of the NAB, which had originally opposed it.

I haven't been able to find any articles about the bill on large
online news sites, but here's an article from Radio World, which
appears to be an industry site:

http://www.rwonline.com/article/110948

This next article is on the website of the group that organized the
effort to create the bill, so it's not neutral, but it does give a
lot more information about who supported it:

http://www.prometheusradio.org/node/2438

I was frustrated that all of the articles talked about technical
requirements for the new stations, but not whether they would have
to actually have local content rather than syndicated feeds (note
the support of several national religious organizations), so I went
looking for the bill itself. Here it is:

http://www.thomas.gov/home/gpoxmlc111/h6533_enr.xml

So this bill really did only address technical issues, expanding
the existing LPFM service. I didn't feel like spending a lot of
time rooting around the FCC site for more details, but I did find
their main LPFM page:

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/lpfm/index.html

And this page about licensing requirements on the GPO website:

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_20...7cfr73.853.htm

There are links to more sections of the CFR he

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/bickel/amfmrule.html#LPFM

Anyway, the bottom line seems to be that as long as a group can
establish a local entity to hold the license, they can put whatever
content they want on the air. I don't see anything that prohibits
syndicated programming and requires the station to actually serve
the local community. I guess we'll just have to hope that some of
them do.

Here's the NPR story that originally brought my attention to the
bill:

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/13/132032...alls-In-Senate

(As the URL indicates, this story aired on Dec. 13th. The bill was
later un-stalled in the Senate.)


Patty