For decades, the public media system has relied on a narrow slice of data — primarily from Community Service Grant (CSG) recipients and NPR/PBS member stations — to understand audience behavior, infrastructure needs and service impact. While valuable, these data sets leave out hundreds of rural, tribal and community licensees whose realities look very different from their urban and well-resourced peers. These are the very stations that have depended most on CPB’s stabilizing support — and now face the greatest vulnerability in a post-CPB landscape.
When national data excludes our stations, the sector misunderstands itself. We lose visibility into who community radio serves, how service is delivered, where gaps exist and what unique value small and rural stations provide as civic infrastructure. This invisibility makes it harder to advocate, harder to plan and harder to build a resilient, equitable future for all public media — not just the largest organizations.
That is why NFCB will be launching the Rural Research Study in 2026, a first-of-its-kind national effort designed to bring rural, tribal and community stations into the center of the data that shapes our field.
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