The National Association of College Broadcasters (NACB), was founded in 1988 by four undergraduate students[1] at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Jumpstarted by a $300,000 grant from the now-defunct CBS Foundation, thanks to connections through the father of co-founder Doug Liman, NACB became the first trade association specifically geared to all aspects of American student-staffed radio and television stations. (Other unaffiliated organizations, such as the National Broadcasting Society, Alpha Epsilon Rho, was geared to student journalists, and not all aspects of station operations, while the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, geared to College radio, did not embrace Student television stations until well after NACB's founding. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters was focused on professionally run stations based on college campuses that were typically National Public Radio affiliates.)
Thanks in part to keynote addresses by legendary television journalist Walter Cronkite at its first national conference in November, 1988; media magnate Ted Turner the following year; and Quincy Jones at 1990's event, NACB put itself on the map quickly, reaching a peak of over 600 member stations in the US and a few internationally by 1992. Its National College Television and Radio Awards was the second (after the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' annual student competition) to give significant cash prizes for student productions in a wide range of programming categories that year, thanks to support from several of the US's major media companies, including CBS, ESPN, CNN, NBC, HBO, FOX, E! Entertainment, MTV Networks and Interep.