North Platte Post

North Platte Post is a digital news outlet serving North Platte and west-central Nebraska, operated by Eagle Radio, part of the employee-owned Eagle Communications. Based in North Platte, the seat of Lincoln County, the site publishes local, regional and national news, sports, weather-related coverage and community information, and it works in tandem with Eagle's cluster of radio stations in the North Platte and Ogallala area. It is one of the local news sites in Eagle's Post News Network, the group of market websites through which the Kansas-based company extended its radio newsrooms onto the web.

Directory listings describe the outlet plainly: a news website operated by Eagle Radio in North Platte, covering local, regional and national news, with sister Post sites elsewhere in Nebraska and in Kansas. Its listed address is 1301 East 4th Street in North Platte, and its newsroom has been led through Eagle's North Platte Media Center, which coordinates newsgathering for both the website and the company's radio properties across the North Platte and Ogallala coverage area.

Part of the Eagle Post network

North Platte Post's parent, Eagle Communications, is a Kansas-based media company that traces its founding to 1948. The modern company was built by Bob Schmidt, who purchased KAYS Radio in Hays, Kansas, in 1989 and expanded Eagle through a series of acquisitions across Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri. Eagle operates about thirty radio stations in the three states, and in addition to broadcasting it offers online services, web development, video production and creative services.

The company's defining structural decision came in 1998, when Bob Schmidt and his wife Pat decided to sell the company to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. That process was fully realized in 2012, when the last of the Schmidts' shares were purchased and Eagle became 100 percent employee-owned. North Platte Post's own reporting on the company notes that the employee-owners continue to carry on the Schmidts' community mission, including support for nonprofits in the Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri communities Eagle serves, and that the couple's outlook also led to the formation of the Schmidt Foundation.

The North Platte and Ogallala stations

Eagle Radio's North Platte and Ogallala operation runs a substantial cluster of stations alongside the website. Company announcements list KELN at 97.1 FM, KOOQ at 1410 AM and 98.1 FM, KNPQ at 107.3 FM, KRNP at 100.7 FM and KZTL at 93.5 FM, together with two websites: North Platte Post and Sandhills Post, the latter serving Ogallala and its surrounding area. KELN is the cluster's hot adult contemporary station, branded as Mix 97-One, while KNPQ at 107.3 is its Q Country station, licensed to Hershey and serving the North Platte area.

The reach of that cluster extends well beyond the city limits. Eagle has described its service area from the Ogallala and North Platte studios as covering Keith, Arthur, Perkins, Chase, Lincoln, Garden, Deuel, McPherson, Logan, Hayes and Frontier counties in Nebraska, along with Phillips and Sedgwick counties in Colorado and most of the Nebraska Panhandle, with additional studio locations in Alliance and Chadron. North Platte Post sits at the center of that footprint as its shared digital newsroom.

How the newsroom works

The clearest description of North Platte Post's newsroom comes from Eagle itself. When the company advertised for a news director for its Nebraska communities, it described the North Platte Media Center role as integral to the day-to-day newsgathering operations for the North Platte and Ogallala coverage area, spanning five radio stations and NorthPlattePost.com. The news director's duties included ensuring reliable coverage of North Platte-area local news and community events, publishing text, visual and audio content to the website, and producing broadcast news coverage.

The same description underlines how integrated the operation is. The news director was expected to maintain and grow the North Platte Post Facebook page and respond to readers there, provide talent for live broadcasts for clients, handle severe weather coverage for the county coverage area in the North Platte and Ogallala region, and attend city council and community meetings in North Platte and Ogallala as needed. Collaboration with the operations manager, market manager, marketing consultants, programmers and the video team was described as essential to the job.

What North Platte Post covers

The site's homepage is organized into local and regional streams. Local coverage concentrates on Lincoln County and the city of North Platte: arrests and court matters, city council decisions on utility rates and development requests, county transportation studies and public hearings, school board business and community events. A recurring feature, The Hot Sheets, appears as a daily digest item, and the site regularly carries public-meeting notices and candidate information during election season.

Election coverage is a visible part of the mission. For the November 2024 general election, Eagle Media co-presented a Lincoln County candidates forum at the Lincoln County Fairgrounds, with a meet-and-greet before a question-and-answer session that was broadcast on FM 98.1 and streamed on NorthPlattePost.com. The races featured included North Platte City Council wards, the North Platte Airport Authority and North Platte Public Schools Board of Education seats, and viewers were invited to submit questions during the event.

Sports and state news fill out the regional stream, including Nebraska Cornhuskers athletics, high school sports from across the region and statewide political developments from Lincoln. A Post Podcast strand has carried interviews recorded from the Good Morning North Platte program on FM 98.1, including a conversation with the director of AARP Nebraska about an upcoming primary election, and the site has used the podcast to invite readers to share stories of people and organizations making Greater Nebraska better.

A format change at a sister station

The cluster's history includes a notable format change at KOOQ. In December 2018, Eagle Radio prepared to launch a new format on the station, then a sports outlet known as ESPN 1410, alongside its new FM translator at 98.1. After stunting with Christmas music as Reindeer Radio from December 1, the station flipped on December 26 to classic hits as 98.1 FM, positioned around the greatest hits of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with a new local morning show hosted by Scotty C and Kyle beginning January 2.

Even in changing formats, the station kept its large sports component, retaining North Platte Community College and North Platte High School play-by-play as well as Denver Broncos and Kansas City Royals broadcasts. The episode illustrates the ecosystem North Platte Post belongs to: a group of stations whose formats evolve, but whose local sports, weather and news commitments carry across both the airwaves and the website.

Community involvement

North Platte Post's pages regularly document Eagle's community giving in the area. Its contests have been used as fundraising vehicles: Go Pink and No Shave November photo contests on the site, built around cancer awareness, generated a $500 donation from Eagle Radio and its business partners to the Callahan Cancer Center, with dozens of local businesses supporting the effort. Eagle Communications and the Schmidt Foundation also donated $29,250 to Big Idea North Platte, a business pitch competition hosted by the North Platte Young Professionals, substantially increasing its prize pool for adult and youth entrants.

The site likewise covered an Eagle Radio employee-owner and the Schmidt Foundation making a donation to the North Platte Area Habitat for Humanity, presented at the North Platte operation's annual ESOP meeting at the Prairie Arts Center, where company chairman Gary Shorman carried on the tradition of flipping the ESOP coins given to each employee-owner when hired. Eagle Radio of North Platte and Ogallala has also received top honors at Eagle's company-wide annual meeting, recognized alongside its stations and both of its websites.

Audience and digital presence

North Platte Post is built to be followed as much as visited. The newsroom maintains an active Facebook page and an X account, promotes a Post mobile app for iOS and Android at the foot of its stories, and lists reader contact through its North Platte office, with the phone number (308) 532-1120 published in media directories. Its reporters, including Scott Carlson, whose byline appears on many of its community stories, solicit story ideas directly from readers by email, particularly for features about people doing positive work in the region.

The outlet competes and coexists with North Platte's established print media, principally the North Platte Telegraph, the city's primary newspaper, and the weekly North Platte Bulletin. Within that landscape, North Platte Post's distinction is its radio integration: the same newsroom that writes for the website broadcasts on five stations, covers severe weather for the region, and streams civic events such as candidate forums, giving a mid-sized Nebraska city a combined broadcast-and-digital news service run by an employee-owned company.