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For most Americans, public service media (PSM) are synonymous with National Public Radio for radio and audio and Public Broadcasting Service for television and video. However, these national services do not fully circumscribe the PSM sphere in the United States. US community media are non-commercial, locally controlled outlets that produce content intended for local audiences, most often focused on local concerns associated with housing, education, government and the arts. This study provides an overview of the present state of community media in the United States. It draws on a variety of sources, including data from the industry, and from the professional press, as well as a series of extensive informational interviews with community media leaders around the United States. The subjects include representatives from community radio and community television outlets that serve urban, suburban and rural markets. After compiling and analysing the quantitative and qualitative data, several key indicators emerge that help to describe the current state of community media in the United States and point towards challenges and opportunities ahead for the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a content analysis method, this study examined the way in which 111 radio stations in the U.S. are using the social network system, Twitter. Results of the study revealed that there was only a weak correlation between stations' average quarter hour share and the number of followers of stations' Twitter sites. Also, music stations had more promotional tweets, while news stations provided more news items for their audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to promote localism in U.S. broadcasting, the Federal Communications Commission began licensing Low-Power FM (LPFM) radio in January 2000. FCC rules require that LPFM stations are noncommercial, locally owned and operated, and broadcast at power of 100 watts or less, with signals that travel three to five miles. This article focuses on LPFM programmers’ statements of uncertainty about audience constitution and presence. Given that the establishment of LPFM service rides on the argument that, due to consolidation, there is a need for local stations to produce locally originated programming, serving unique community interests, it is striking to hear programmers reveal they are unsure if any community members are tuning in. In addition to raising questions about prevailing expectations for a form of radio imagined to be the essence of American broadcasting, their comments support claims made by scholars of media policy about the need to reconceptualize localism dur ing a period of media convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars tend to agree that the weak implementation of affirmative localism in US media is primarily due to either the failure of regulators to enforce the principle, or the unworkability of the concept of localism itself. By ‘affirmative localism’ I refer to efforts to foster geographically based local identities and local public spheres through a licensee's program service. This study revisits the history of localism to demonstrate that early regulators were not primarily concerned with fostering affirmative localism, but instead used discourses and structures of localism as part of a class-based project of cultural and economic modernisation of local communities through radio. In this view, regulatory concepts such as local program service and local trusteeship were used to reduce local distinctiveness, limit program diversity, and retain content control with nationally minded regulators in Washington. These regulators' corporate and cosmopolitan vision of modernity is problematic in many ways, but their relative success in using localism to advance that vision calls into question the Federal Radio Commission's reputation for weakness and incompetence. It also suggests that affirmative localism, since it was actively suppressed by regulators in the formative years of US radio, cannot be considered a failed or unworkable concept for broadcasting policy in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]