"But the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio ... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount."

--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in 1969, writing for the majority in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission

"Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not."

--U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, in 1945, writing for the majority in Associated Press v. United States

On October 5, 1998, dozens of unlicensed radio broadcasters marched on Washington, D.C. Their target: the Federal Communications Commission headquarters. But these protesters didn't just carry signs. They hauled puppets. Leading the way was a huge Pinocchio marionette, "Kennardio," named after then-FCC chairman Bill Kennard. And pulling his strings? A TV-headed monster-- the National Association of Broadcasters. "I just chuckled about that, because if anything, I was the NAB's nemesis," says Kennard, now the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, speaking on the phone from Brussels. "I was creating a new radio service that was seen as a threat to the commercial broadcast industry." That radio service was low-power FM, or LPFM, and it's been a long time coming.

In early January, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which is expected to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of noncommercial FM stations. The new law brings into effect much of what Kennard's FCC set in motion more than a decade ago. Like the roughly 800 LPFM stations already in existence, these new entries on the dial will be run by nonprofits: churches, schools, unions, local governments, emergency responders, and other community groups. Their signals must be no stronger than 100 watts, the same as an incandescent light bulb, so a typical broadcast range is only about seven miles in diameter. Unlike all but one current LPFM station, the newcomers will be able to apply for licenses in the top 50 U.S. radio markets-- home to 160 million potential listeners. A dollar may not get you very far in New York City or Los Angeles, but even a weak radio signal carries.

Many questions about how the law actually works will not be answered until the FCC issues final rules, expected later this year. And some of the details can get rather technical: For example, the "contour method," which is a way of measuring potential signal interference. Still, at its most basic, what the Local Community Radio Act does is remove restrictions on LPFM stations that have been in place since the turn of the millennium. And it frees the FCC's hand to issue more licenses for LPFM stations in places where it couldn't before. For some lucky communities-- and the increasingly interconnected independent music world is only one-- the Local Community Radio Act could quietly change the way we think about radio: as an art form, as a medium, and as a public forum.

With the Internet, LPFM stations have the potential to be at once local and global, nostalgic and forward-looking, functional and aesthetic. Or a lot of them could totally suck... it all depends on people like us caring a whole awful lot.

"I'm a strong believer that the passage of this bill is going to make it possible now for a lot of small, community-type programming to make it onto the airwaves: independent musicians, people that are doing good work in their communities," says one of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), just hours after speaking on the House floor against health care repeal. (Doyle has previously come to the defense of constituent Gregg Gillis, better known as mash-up artist Girl Talk.) "We're going to stay on top of the FCC to make sure that good people and good groups are getting these licenses."

It's no secret radio isn't what it used to be. In one sense, the 21st century has been a golden age for streaming audio as an art form, with websites and podcasts allowing for a greater variety of curated listening experiences than ever before. These are also exciting times for noncommercial broadcasters such as NPR, KEXP, or WFMU. But as a medium, traditional American radio is in sorry shape. Advertising revenues are down. Media consolidation has robbed cities of local voices, and it continues-- see the Comcast-NBC merger (which won't affect radio, but does for the first time put a single company in control of both video content and the cables that deliver it). Noncommercial radio has its own struggles: House Republicans want to defund NPR, and community stations like San Francisco's KUSF are going off the air. Meanwhile, Internet access remains limited to those who will pay for it, which excludes huge swathes of the population, especially African-Americans.

LPFM is hardly a solution to all of these challenges. Its 100-watt limit is far weaker than the 1000 watts the FCC initially envisioned under Kennard, a Clinton appointee and former college radio host. The final law includes various other concessions to win the support of not only the NAB, the powerful industry group, but also NPR. And existing broadcasters have gobbled up many frequencies that originally could have been available to LPFM stations.

When speaking with activists involved in LPFM, you immediately notice their passion, and then you maybe wonder why you didn't know about all this earlier. The Local Community Radio Act is a stirring example of people who might not ordinarily trust the government voluntarily casting aside their cynicism to work within the system-- and, all these years later, finally succeeding. The efforts of hundreds of groups, from MoveOn.org to the Christian Coalition, from civil rights organizations to the band OK Go, have resulted in opportunities for more people to have a voice in their own communities. Coupled with the Internet, LPFM stations have the potential to be at once local and global, nostalgic and forward-looking, functional and aesthetic. Or a lot of them could totally suck. As with the congressional fight, it all depends on people like us caring a whole awful lot.

For many, radio has a sentimental connection: baseball games, listening to your parents listen to the news, driving around aimlessly in high school. And it could be a door to new experiences. "When I was 10 years old listening to the radio, I wasn't thinking about this stuff," says Mac McCaughan, co-founder of Merge Records and a founding member of the bands Superchunk and Portastatic. "But I did know that in between Led Zeppelin and Journey or whatever, the album rock station would sometimes play a song by the Clash. And even if you're 10 years old, you notice that it sounds different than the other stuff you're hearing. I was certainly exposed to things via the radio that really changed my life."

More than 90% of the population over age 12 listens to the radio, according to the latest Pew Research Center data. By contrast, just two-thirds of American adults currently use a high-speed Internet connection at home. Meanwhile, total radio revenue fell 18% in 2009, with local and national radio advertising expected to continue dropping at least through this year, while listenership held steady around 236 million people per week. NPR listenership, on the other hand, nearly doubled from 1999 to 2009, according to Fast Company, and now stands at 33.9 million weekly listeners. Radio is in a time of transition.

You could trace that transition to midway through the Clinton Administration. In one of its first major pieces of economic legislation after retaking the House majority for the first time in 40 years, a Republican-led Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which massively deregulated the number of outlets a media company could own. At the time, America had 10,257 commercial radio stations and 5,133 radio owners, according to FCC data. As of last May, there are 11,202 commercial radio stations but only 3,143 owners, a 39% drop in the number of owners since 1996.

Instead of local music, or local DJs debating local issues, radio listeners now often heard DJs from other markets pretending to live in their city and spinning identical playlists. In Boston, for example, the heritage black-owned commercial radio station, WILD 1090 AM, was eventually sold and stopped being an urban format station. People started to notice the difference. A movement of unlicensed radio broadcasters emerged: Free Radio Berkeley, Free Radio Santa Cruz. The puppet-filled demonstration at the FCC came after Kennard made good on his legal obligation to shut down such "pirate" stations.

"I didn't like shutting them down, frankly, because a lot of them were run by people who just wanted to connect with their communities," the ambassador explains. "So I said, 'Gee, there's gotta be a way to enable small, community-based nonprofit organizations to have a voice on the airwaves using low-power FM transmitters.' That was really the origin of the low-power FM service. And of course, it was a tough battle, because the incumbent commercial broadcasting industry and the noncommercial broadcasting industry, including NPR, fought this aggressively."

90% of the population over age 12 listens to the radio... by contrast, just two-thirds of American adults currently use a high-speed Internet connection at home.

Radio broadcasters exhaust no small amount of money on Capitol Hill, and they contribute in a way that may give bipartisanship fans pause. The NAB donated more than $1 million to congressional races in 2008, 55% of it to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org. During the same cycle, people and political action committees involved with Clear Channel gave $785,000, with 59% to Republicans. Last year, on top of more than $847,000 in campaign funding-- this time 60% to Democrats-- the NAB spent a total of almost $10 million on lobbying. The power to unleash Sick Puppies on an unwitting nation doesn't come cheap.

The Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000, supported by both the NAB and NPR, effectively gutted the FCC's LPFM initiative. Under the FCC's plan, noncommercial groups could apply for LPFM stations on a "third adjacent frequency" of an existing full-power station. In plain English, that means that if a full-power station is at 97.1, then an LPFM station could theoretically be opened at 96.5. The 2000 law said even a third adjacent frequency was too close. This didn't stop LPFM stations from operating in many rural areas, but it did keep the program out of the biggest cities, where population density could have made it most useful. The new law removes such restrictions. Where a third adjacent frequency is not available, nonprofits will likely be able to apply for FCC waivers to operate on a second adjacent frequency.

WGXC studios in the Catskill Community Center, courtesy Prometheus Radio Project*

Existing broadcasters have long argued LPFM would cause unacceptable levels of interference. The NAB went so far as to send around a CD that purportedly demonstrated the LPFM initiative's terrible impact by basically mashing up two previously recorded radio signals; the FCC's chief engineer called this CD demo "misleading" and "simply wrong." But the curiously named Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act did, in fact, preserve an opening for community radio activists. The law required the FCC, then led by Bush appointee Michael Powell, to study whether or not third adjacent frequencies would truly interfere. In 2004, the agency reported to Congress that even on a third adjacent channel, LPFM stations "do not pose a significant risk of causing interference to existing full-service FM stations."

Case closed. Or so you might think. But being based on misguided premises didn't end the ban on third-adjacent LPFM stations. Only Congress could do that. For local community radio activists, technical vindication was only the beginning of an epic battle against the broadcasting industry, one that has culminated so far in the recent legislation. One of the organizations most prominently involved has been Prometheus Radio Project. Headquartered in Philadelphia, the nonprofit was founded by Pete Tridish (pronounced "Petri Dish"), whose short-lived Radio Mutiny was one of the very same illegal stations Kennard's FCC had shut down.

"Ten years ago, five years ago, the NAB claimed that if you put an LPFM station three clicks on the dial or closer, it would cause the entire world to explode," says Hannah Sassaman, a longtime organizer with Prometheus and now a senior field analyst with the Open Technology Initiative, a project of the New America Foundation think tank. "They didn't compromise on that at all. The reason why we won and the reason why the NAB decided to compromise is because we built a movement."

NEXT: Building a grassroots movement