Little Apple Post
Little Apple Post is a digital news outlet serving Manhattan, Kansas — the Riley County city whose nickname, “The Little Apple,” gives the site its name — published at littleapplepost.com by Eagle Media, the employee-owned Kansas media company headquartered in Hays. It is the Manhattan front page of Eagle’s shared Manhattan–Junction City newsroom and a member of the Post News Network, Eagle’s family of local news sites across Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, where it stands alongside its sister site, JC Post.
Manhattan is a college city with a military neighbor: home to Kansas State University, set in the Flint Hills at the junction of the Kansas and Big Blue rivers, and closely tied to Fort Riley just down the road. Its news runs from Kansas State football and Aggieville nightlife to city commission debates, Riley County arrests and school board decisions. Little Apple Post covers that mix daily, in the fast, service-first style of the Post network.
Ownership and one newsroom, two front pages
Eagle Communications was founded in 1948 in Hays, built from KAYS radio by founders Robert E. “Bob” Schmidt and Ross Beach into an employee-owned company operating radio stations across Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri. Its digital arm, the Post News Network, has been described by Eagle as nine Post news sites in communities across the three states, each staffed by the local Eagle newsroom.
In the Flint Hills, that newsroom is deliberately shared. Eagle’s stations are licensed to Junction City and Ogden, with studios on West 6th Street in Junction City and an auxiliary studio on South 4th Street in Manhattan. The company’s recruiting for the market describes the arrangement exactly: a news and sports reporter serving the Manhattan and Junction City markets is responsible for day-to-day local news coverage for Eagle’s stations in both cities and for its digital platforms, LittleApplePost.com and JCPost.com alike — posting timely, accurate stories to both, interviewing local leaders, newsmakers, coaches and athletes, and covering the area across radio, web and social media. Little Apple Post is therefore not a Manhattan edition of a Junction City product or the reverse; it is one of two hometown front pages maintained by a single local staff.
The stations behind the site
Three Eagle stations serve the Manhattan area and supply the Post’s audio journalism. KJCK at 1420 AM and 107.9 FM, licensed to Junction City, has broadcast since May 15, 1949. KJCK-FM, “Power Hits 97.5,” first aired on July 22, 1965, and reaches the Manhattan–Fort Riley area — and parts of the Topeka and Salina areas — at 100,000 watts with contemporary hit radio. KQLA, “Q Country 103.5,” licensed to Ogden, between Manhattan and Junction City near Fort Riley, went on the air on February 14, 1986, joined Eagle when the company’s purchase of the Platinum Broadcasting stations was approved on December 15, 2011, and flipped to country on July 29, 2013; its HD subchannel, heard on a 92.7 FM translator in Manhattan, has carried classic country as Country Rewind. Interviews, newscasts and games from these stations flow into the Post as audio and video, and Post stories are promoted across the cluster — including through the joint JC and Little Apple Post radio auction the stations run for listeners in both cities.
Local news: arrests, commissions and neighborhoods
Little Apple Post’s local section works on a daily rhythm. Its Riley County Arrest Report appears day after day, a dated public-records service that readers check the way earlier generations checked a courthouse column. Around it sit reported stories from city and county government, Kansas State and the neighborhoods. The archive shows the range: Manhattan residents living near Anthony Middle School organizing against a Kansas Gas Service plan to clear trees along Gary Avenue for pipeline work — a project the utility first proposed to cut through the whole stand of trees behind about a dozen homes, and which residents, fearing for a frog- and bird-filled urban riparian forest along an eroding creek, pushed to reroute entirely onto school district land beyond the trees. The Post covered both community meetings, the utility’s amended plan to clear only about two hundred feet at the east end, and the residents’ counter-demand — local environmental politics reported at the level of a single street.
City commission coverage receives the same care. When Manhattan’s commissioners took up the long-running question of waste management in the Aggieville entertainment district — years of surveys, a consultant’s study, and the choice between an exclusive city-run cartage system and tighter rules for competing haulers — the Post’s reporting walked readers through both options, the consultants’ reasoning about truck traffic, pavement and air quality, and the complexity of each path. It is detailed, minutes-level civic journalism, published for the people who will live with the decision.
Kansas State and Manhattan sports
Sports on Little Apple Post starts with Kansas State. The Wildcats’ football and basketball schedules, honors and coaching news are hometown coverage in Manhattan: kickoff times for the Dillons Sunflower Showdown against Kansas, results against Houston and Utah, and Chiefs and Royals coverage for the region’s professional fans sit alongside Manhattan High School news — such as the appointment of an interim head coach for Manhattan High girls’ basketball — and the annual football meeting between Manhattan and Junction City, which the Post covered as the rivalry it is. The Sunflower Showdown item that appears on the site is shared with JC Post, a reminder that in this market the same fans, families and broadcasters span both cities.
Eagle’s sports operation supports the coverage with play-by-play and talk across its stations, and its Manhattan–Junction City reporter doubles as the voice of the Junction City Bluejays — a division of labor that keeps the Post’s sports pages close to the locker rooms on both ends of the market.
University city life
Because Manhattan is Kansas State’s town, much of Little Apple Post’s community coverage is university-city coverage: the Sunset Zoo’s “Boo at the Zoo” trick-or-treat event, reported as family news; the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, whose employees live across the two-city area and whose doings — down to a computer stolen from an employee’s vehicle — are local news; and the civic symbols of a city that takes its identity seriously. When Manhattan chose a new city flag, the Post reported the full contest: 120 designs from artists as young as eight and as far away as Sweden, 3,021 ballots cast, and Kim Medvid’s winning “Little Apple on the Prairie” design — the Little Apple rising out of the Flint Hills, its green for the native grasses and opportunity, blue for the Big Blue and Kansas rivers and the prairie sky, white for the city’s future — sent to the city commission for adoption. A story like that explains the site’s own name better than any branding could: the Little Apple is what Manhattan calls itself, and the Post is named for its readers.
Region, weather and public safety
Beyond Manhattan, the Post carries the network’s regional file — Kansas politics, agriculture, highway patrol reports — and its own weather service, including hazardous weather outlooks for the Flint Hills, where storm season and winter driving are standing concerns. Fort Riley threads through the coverage as it threads through local life: soldiers hospitalized after crashes on Interstate 70, investigations crossing between military and civilian communities, and families for whom Manhattan and Junction City are both home. Public-safety reporting, anchored by the daily Riley County arrest report, gives the site its character as a daily record rather than only a news magazine.
Digital presence and relationship to JC Post
Littleapplepost.com is built in the Post News Network’s common form: local, region and sports streams, dated stories, multimedia from the Eagle stations and sharing in both directions with sister sites. Its stories travel — network roundups carried a Little Apple Post account of a Kansas-native performer’s tenth Country Stampede appearance and a “Battle of the Badges” blood drive that collected 202 pints to readers across the network — and its byline appears inside JC Post stories filed from Manhattan, as the two sites cross-publish the shared newsroom’s work. For the reader, the boundary between the two Posts is simply the city line: Manhattan stories wear the Little Apple name, Junction City stories the JC name, and the newsroom underneath is one.
Audience and significance
Little Apple Post serves Manhattan and Riley County readers — Kansas State students, faculty and fans; Fort Riley families; Aggieville businesses; alumni who keep a home-page eye on the Little Apple from wherever the Army or a career has taken them. Its significance is that a mid-sized Kansas college city sustains a daily, staffed, locally accountable digital newsroom as part of an employee-owned state network — one that can follow a pipeline easement behind a dozen houses, a flag contest with three thousand voters and a Wildcat kickoff time with equal seriousness. The name promises local affection; the archive delivers local attention.
