Long Island City Post
Long Island City Post, published online as LIC Post at licpost.com, is a local news website covering Long Island City and western Queens in New York City. It is one of the neighborhood sites of the Queens Post group, a family of hyperlocal publications founded by Christian Murray and Czarinna Andres, and since January 2023 it has been owned by Schneps Media, the New York City-based publisher of dozens of print and digital community publications. The site reports on development, local government, community boards, business, schools, crime, restaurants and neighborhood life in one of the fastest-changing districts of Queens.
The Queens Post group
LIC Post belongs to a network built around individual Queens neighborhoods. The Queens Post group was established in 2010 by Christian Murray, a former Newsday political reporter, together with Czarinna Andres. Murray first developed the model with the Sunnyside Post, covering the Sunnyside neighborhood where the approach of close attention to real estate deals, community board decisions and local business news—especially matters affecting the neighborhood's many apartment dwellers—found a loyal readership. The model was then extended neighborhood by neighborhood across the borough.
By the time of the group's sale to Schneps Media, Queens Post consisted of 11 news sites in Queens and one in Brooklyn, generating approximately one million unique readers per month. The sister sites named at the acquisition included Sunnyside Post, Astoria Post, Jackson Heights Post, Forest Hills Post, Ridgewood Post, Flushing Post, Bayside Post, Jamaica Queens Post and Brooklyn Post, alongside LIC Post itself. Each site keeps its own neighborhood identity while sharing reporting resources, so that borough-wide stories can be told once and neighborhood stories can be told in granular local detail.
Coverage of Long Island City
Long Island City, in western Queens across the East River from Manhattan, has been transformed over recent decades from an industrial and warehouse district into a center of residential towers, offices, hotels and arts institutions, and the Post's coverage follows that transformation closely. Development and land use are central beats: zoning and variance cases before the Board of Standards and Appeals, community board land use meetings, and large-scale plans for districts such as the Anable Basin waterfront, where the Post reported developers' proposals for ten to twelve million square feet of building on a 28-acre site, including commercial space, mixed-income housing, open space, school sites and arts space on land that included the parcels once slated for Amazon's HQ2 campus.
Local institutions recur throughout the coverage: Long Island City Partnership and its Business Improvement District, whose plans for retail recruitment, graffiti cleanup crews, visitor kiosks and an expanded district boundary the Post reported in detail; Community Board 2, which reviews land use in the area; and the City Council members representing the district. Business openings and closings, restaurant news, transit and street conditions, school news, public safety and events fill out the daily mix, together with coverage of the neighborhood's cultural venues and waterfront parks. The emphasis throughout is on decisions made in rooms—community board meetings, agency hearings, BID annual meetings—that residents rarely attend but that shape the neighborhood they live in.
Acquisition by Schneps Media in 2023
In January 2023, Schneps Media announced its acquisition of the Queens Post group, including LIC Post. Schneps Media, at the time publisher of over a dozen news websites and more than 80 print publications across New York City, Philadelphia and Florida, said the acquisition would bolster its reach in Queens and Brooklyn and underscore its commitment to local journalism. Founders Christian Murray and Czarinna Andres continued operating the websites as part of Schneps Media, working with the company's editors and reporters. In a joint statement, they said they were proud of the sites built over the previous decade and looked forward to tapping the resources of the Schneps network. Joshua Schneps, the company's chief executive, said Queens Post and its team had grown a large loyal audience across websites, social media and email newsletters, and that the founders and staff would join Schneps to continue its growth online.
The sale placed LIC Post inside one of New York's largest community media companies while preserving, by design, the neighborhood brand and editorial team that readers knew. For a hyperlocal site, the arrangement trades independence for the advertising scale, production resources and cross-promotion of a large local publisher.
Schneps Media
Schneps Media is a family-owned New York City media company founded in 1985 by Victoria Schneps-Yunis, who began it with the publication of The Queens Courier from her home in Bayside, Queens. The company is led by Schneps-Yunis and her son, chief executive Joshua Schneps, and owns and operates more than 50 publications in print and online, along with seminars and events. Its growth came through successive acquisitions: the Long Island Press in 2017; Community News Group and NYC Community Media in 2018, which brought titles including the Brooklyn Paper and Gay City News; amNewYork in 2019 and Metro New York shortly after, merged as amNewYork Metro; and further Long Island publishers in 2024. The Queens Post acquisition in 2023 added a digital-native, neighborhood-by-neighborhood network to a portfolio historically rooted in weekly print newspapers such as the Queens Courier and in borough-wide digital brands such as QNS.com.
Editorial approach
LIC Post follows the Queens Post template: short, frequent, fact-dense stories written for residents of a single neighborhood, often built from meetings, official documents, developer presentations and interviews with local officials and advocates. Christian Murray's own reporting for the site illustrates the style—detailed accounts of community board and agency proceedings, explanations of zoning mechanisms such as variances and air-rights transfers, and attention to how citywide legislation would land on local streets. Stories frequently explain not only what was decided but the process behind it and the objections recorded along the way, such as community board recommendations that are advisory only. That explanatory, meeting-by-meeting coverage is the core service: it converts obscure municipal procedure into usable knowledge for the people who will live with the consequences.
Long Island City as a news subject
The neighborhood gives the site an unusually concentrated agenda. Long Island City contains Queens Plaza and Court Square, major transit interchanges, a growing cluster of hotels, large public housing and market-rate developments, and an industrial heritage that continues in studios, workshops and warehouses. The collapse of the Amazon HQ2 plan for the waterfront in 2019, and the unified rezoning proposals that followed for the same land, made the district a focal point of citywide debate over development, jobs and affordability—debate the Post covered at the level of individual community board workshops. Reporting on the Business Improvement District's expansion into Hunters Point, on retail recruitment along Jackson Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, and on pedestrian and population growth documents the same transformation from the street level. Few New York neighborhoods compress so much change into so small an area, and a dedicated local site is often the only outlet following all of it continuously.
Place in New York local media
New York City's local news has consolidated into a few large groups and a set of borough and neighborhood outlets. Within Queens, LIC Post sits alongside Schneps stablemates such as QNS.com and the Queens Courier, the Queens Chronicle, and citywide digital outlets, as one of the principal sources devoted specifically to Long Island City. Its survival and sale—built over more than a decade as an independent hyperlocal, then acquired by the borough's dominant community publisher—reflect the broader economics of neighborhood news: audiences remain loyal to granular local coverage, while ownership and advertising increasingly operate at borough and city scale.
Access
Long Island City Post is published online at licpost.com and is free to read. Readers can also reach its reporting through the Queens Post network's sister sites and newsletters, and through Schneps Media's Queens publications. Its coverage is devoted to Long Island City and the surrounding western Queens neighborhoods of New York City, in the borough of Queens.
