Hays Post

Hays Post is a digital news outlet serving Hays and Ellis County in northwest Kansas, and the flagship community of Eagle Media — the employee-owned, Kansas-based media company headquartered in Hays itself. Published at hayspost.com, it has been described by its owner as the region’s most visited news site and as the most trafficked news website in northwest Kansas. It is the online arm of Eagle’s five Hays radio stations, published from the Eagle Media Center at 2300 Hall Street, and it is the original model for the company’s Post News Network of local news sites across Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri.

Because Hays is both the city it covers and the city its owner calls home, Hays Post occupies a special place in the network. Eagle’s founders built the company here, its corporate offices are here, and its best-known broadcasters are Hays institutions. The Post carries that inheritance into digital form: local news, Fort Hays State University and high school sports, obituaries, letters, announcements and a Post Podcast, published at a daily pace.

Origins and the Eagle story

Eagle Communications was founded in 1948 in Hays, when KAYS — one of the oldest radio stations in western Kansas — first signed on. Robert E. “Bob” Schmidt and Ross Beach were behind the station; Schmidt became general manager after graduating from college in 1950, bought the station in 1952, and with Beach built it into Eagle Communications. The company launched KAYS-TV in 1958, grew into radio, television and later broadband, and became employee-owned, with its workers holding ownership through an employee stock ownership plan. After selling its broadband operations in a 2019 restructuring, Eagle continued as a media company under longtime chief executive Gary Shorman, still based in Hays, operating its radio stations and digital services.

Hays Post is the digital expression of that history. Kansas newspaper directory data lists Hays Post as established in 2011, publishing Monday through Sunday — a daily that happens to live on the web and on phone home screens rather than on newsprint. When Eagle built native apps and mobile sites for the Post, its own announcement called HaysPost.com the most trafficked news website in northwest Kansas, a claim the company repeats in describing it as the region’s most visited news site.

The Hays stations behind the Post

Five Eagle stations broadcast from the Eagle Media Center at 2300 Hall Street, and their schedules structure much of the Post’s content: KAYS at 1400 AM and 94.3 FM, KFIX at 96.9 FM, KHAZ at 99.5 FM, KJLS at 103.3 FM and KKQY at 101.9 FM. KAYS itself is a piece of Kansas broadcasting history. Sportscaster Bob Davis, later famous as the longtime voice of the Kansas Jayhawks, spent sixteen years at KAYS broadcasting Hays High, Thomas More Prep-Marian and Fort Hays State athletics before his hall-of-fame career in Lawrence; other Kansas broadcasting hall-of-famers also passed through the station, and Fort Hays State students once learned television production on KAYS-TV’s equipment after hours.

The present-day lineup keeps the same local emphasis. KAYS carries Kansas Jayhawks athletics and Kansas City Royals baseball, KJLS carries Fort Hays State, KFIX carries Hays High and the Kansas City Chiefs, and KHAZ carries Thomas More Prep-Marian. A Hays family can follow every one of those teams through one company — and read the results afterward on Hays Post.

Local news coverage

Hays Post organizes its journalism under Local, Region, Sports and Announcements, and the local section works like a city desk. Recent coverage includes the Ellis County Commission — including a likely vote on funding for ACCESS, the county transportation service — Hays city government, election administration such as voter registration deadlines and candidate filings for offices like the 23rd Judicial District magistrate judgeships, and letters to the editor with their own stated deadlines around the general election. School news from Hays USD 489, court and public-safety reporting, and obituaries — with instructions for submitting them — are standing features.

Letters deserve a note: Hays Post publishes a steady stream of them, signed and argued, on everything from museum collections to social services funding. In an era when many digital outlets dropped letters entirely, the Post functions as Ellis County’s public square, and its comment and letter culture is part of why its audience is loyal.

Sports: Tigers, Indians and Monarchs

Sports is where Hays Post’s radio roots show most clearly. Fort Hays State University — the Tigers — is covered as a hometown team: soccer honors from the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association, Tiger Talk programs, the Defend the Fort podcast and play-by-play across the Eagle stations. Hays High School’s Indians and Thomas More Prep-Marian’s Monarchs receive the same treatment, with named broadcasters who are local celebrities in their own right. Dustin Armbruster, the voice of the Hays High Indians, has called Hays High athletics for twenty years, is a multiple Kansas Association of Broadcasters award winner and a two-time sportscaster of the year, and received the Hod Humiston Award. Jonathan Zweygardt — “JZ” — has covered local news and sports with Eagle since 2011 as the voice of the TMP-Marian Monarchs.

Eagle’s general manager has made the philosophy explicit in the company’s own sponsored profiles: people trust voices they know, and that trust is the foundation for everything the company does. The Post extends those trusted voices into print, video and podcasts — including livestreamed games, with a portion of streaming revenue returned to the area high schools.

The Post Podcast and multimedia

Hays Post is an audio outlet as much as a text one. Its Post Podcast features interviews and community conversations — recent editions covered Trick or Treat on the Bricks and Christmas events in downtown Hays, and a Fort Hays State vice president discussing how to keep businesses and students in western Kansas. Eagle Media interviews, Tiger Talk shows and sports broadcasts are posted as listenable and watchable items inside the news flow, and its video team produces livestreams and commercial work. For readers who first knew Eagle as a voice on the radio, the Post keeps the relationship in the medium they prefer.

Announcements and community service

The Announcements section is the Post’s community bulletin board: a community calendar, toy drives benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of Ellis County, church conferences, sewer-cleaning notices from the city, astronomy club star parties at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, extension garden festivals and the Ellis community’s Trick or Treat So Others Can Eat food drive. None of this is glamorous, and all of it is essential — it is the information layer that tells a small city what is happening this week and where to show up.

Eagle has also used its Hays platform for regional relief. During the 2019 Nebraska floods, Eagle Communications collected donations at its Kansas stations, with Hays contributions gathered at the Eagle Media Center on Hall Street and matched up to twenty-five thousand dollars by the Robert E. and Patricia A. Schmidt Family Foundation — founded by Eagle’s own founder — for the Nebraska Red Cross. The Post documented the effort as both news and invitation.

The digital shift at Eagle

Hays Post also anchors Eagle’s broader evolution from “Eagle Radio” to Eagle Media. In the company’s own sponsored profile, staff describe a multi-platform organization blending broadcast radio with digital storytelling, streaming and data-driven advertising, under the unchanged mission “Our Community Connected.” Alongside HaysPost.com, the Hays operation offers video production and livestreaming, targeted digital advertising and geofencing, streaming audio advertising on services such as Spotify and Pandora, connected-TV advertising, and website design and hosting. Digital coordinator Katie Dorzweiler explained the logic in that profile: people still listen to local radio, but they also stream music in the car, check news on a phone and watch shows through apps, so Eagle’s job is to reach the same local audience wherever it is.

For local businesses, that makes the Post more than a news site — it is the storefront of the largest local media operation in northwest Kansas. For readers, it means the site is supported by a full commercial media company rather than by a lone publisher.

Audience and significance

Hays Post’s audience is Hays, Ellis County and the northwest Kansas trade area — farmers checking an agriculture report, parents checking school news, Tiger fans checking a score, and former residents checking obituaries and letters from afar. Its significance is twofold. First, it demonstrates that a mid-sized Kansas city can sustain a heavily used, professionally staffed daily news outlet in digital form. Second, as the home-market flagship of an employee-owned company founded in 1948, it is the proof of concept for the entire Post News Network: what Eagle built first and best in Hays, it has replicated from Salina to St. Joseph. Other Posts may cover bigger cities, but Hays Post is where the model lives.