The days of maintaining public inspection files in a dusty file cabinet will soon be over for stations in the 50 largest Nielsen Audio markets with five or more fulltime employees.

Those will be the first stations required to migrate their public and political files online under modernized public inspection file rules adopted by the FCC yesterday.

Responding to a request by the National Association of Broadcasters, all other radio stations won’t be subject to the new rules until March 1, 2018 although they’ll be able to begin posting earlier if they voluntarily choose to.

Yesterday’s Report and Order also applies to satellite radio companies and cable and satellite TV operators. The Commission adopted online public file rules for broadcast television stations in 2012, which completed their transition to the online file in July 2014.

The new rules, which are expected to go into effect in the next 3-6 months, include some measures to minimize the effort and cost of moving files from station facilities to an online system. Only public documents not already on file with, or maintained by, the FCC in its own database will need to be uploaded. The Commission will include documents it already has on file in the online file.

Archived political file material will also be exempt from the online requirement. Stations will only need to upload new political file documents.

And once stations have fully transitioned to the online file, they won’t have to maintain a local public file, as long as they provide online access to back-up political file material via their own website in case the FCC’s online file database crashes.

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