Community Radio Program Awards (aka Golden Reels) on Hiatus for Evaluation

In order to evaluate how the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) can best serve its membership and Community Radio as a whole, we will be conducting a review of our membership services during the summer and fall of 2005, including the annual awards program. Given the time and effort required to receive program submissions, recruit enough independent judges, as well as evaluate and score the programs for both finalists and winners, we have made the very difficult decision to suspend the awards program for 2006.

We will be sending additional information to our members about this review in the near future, but given that this is the typical time to begin soliciting programs for submission we feel it is important to make this announcement now.

We anticipate that this will be disappointing news to many of you working in Community Radio, and we want to emphasize that this decision was not made lightly but in the spirit of aligning the purpose and execution of the awards with the mission and role of NFCB. The awards have long been an important aspect of NFCB’s service to Community Radio, and we have been hearing comments from many of you that led us to many thoughtful discussions about the awards.

We will review the recommendations we receive from our members and hope to develop a revised program to recognize great work in Community Radio.