About the Hometown Media Awards

The Hometown Media Awards is the Foundation of the ACM’s yearly awards program. It is established to honor and promote community media, community radio, and local cable programs that are distributed on Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) access cable television channels.  Proceeds go to the ACM Foundation which is exclusively used for facilitating, preserving and promoting education in community media.

Entries must come from non-commercial programming from access center professionals, independent producers and students. Programs entered must have had their first telecast on a local cable access channel or their initial stream/web distribution on or between January 1 and December 31, 2025.

Each year, nearly one thousand entries are submitted. These entries, or programs, are submitted and evaluated on several factors resulting in over 100 award winners. A panel of judges from the industry evaluate the entries. Awards are presented to the most creative programs that address community needs, develop diverse community involvement, challenge conventional commercial television formats and move viewers to experience television in a different way.

The Hometown Media Awards Celebration is the award presentation for the winners will be held in the summer at the ACM Annual Conference. This year, we will be celebrating our winners on June 24, 2026 in Madison, WI.