What the Hagadone companies own, and how far their reach goes

Few companies have shaped modern Coeur d'Alene like the Hagadone Corporation. It owns the county's daily newspaper, the resort on the lake, the golf course with the floating green, three marinas on Lake Coeur d'Alene and a long list of restaurants. Here's what public records and published reports show it owns, what it has won approval for, and what's happened to the competition over the years.

Who's in charge

Duane Hagadone founded the company in 1976, when he and the Scripps newspaper chain split their partnership and he took ownership of six newspapers, including the Coeur d'Alene Press. His father, Burl Hagadone, had been publisher of the Press since 1936. Duane Hagadone died in April 2021 at 88. His son Brad Hagadone now leads the company as chairman and CEO.

What it owns

Newspapers. The company's publishing division has 16 newspapers in Idaho, Montana and Washington. In Idaho, that's the Coeur d'Alene Press, the Post Falls Press, the North Idaho Business Journal, the Shoshone News-Press, the Bonner County Daily Bee and the Bonners Ferry Herald. It also publishes the This Week visitor guides in Hawaii.

Printing. Under a deal announced in July 2025, Hagadone Media Group took over printing The Spokesman-Review, Spokane's daily paper, starting that September at its North Idaho Production Center in Coeur d'Alene. The Spokesman's owner, the Cowles Co., closed its own printing plant.

The resort. The Coeur d'Alene Resort opened in 1986 with 338 rooms. Its Sherman Tower, under construction now, will add 139 rooms and bring the resort to 477, with an opening planned for 2027. The company also owns the resort golf course, the Hagadone Event Center and restaurants including Beverly's, Cedars, Tito's and Taphouse Unchained.

The lake. Hagadone Marine Group runs the Boardwalk, Blackwell Island and Silver Beach marinas. After buying Murphy Marine Construction's assets in 2024, it reported 1,611 boat slips on Lake Coeur d'Alene. It also runs Lake Coeur d'Alene Cruises and sells and stores boats.

Land. We searched the county's parcel records for property owned under Hagadone company names, plus CDA Press Inc. and Marina Yacht Club LLC, whose state business filing uses Hagadone's mailing box and headquarters address. That came to 53 parcels, about 732 acres, assessed at about $225 million in 2024. The biggest single parcel is the resort itself, assessed at about $74 million.

That's a lot for one company, but it's a small share of the county as a whole: about 0.4% of all assessed property value in Kootenai County, and about 0.8% of the value at Coeur d'Alene addresses. What stands out is where the land is: the downtown waterfront, the lakeshore and the marinas.

What it got approved

Some of the company's biggest projects needed something from the public, and got it.

The resort tower. A Spokesman-Review column in 2016 said the floating Boardwalk exists because of an agreement that let the company build the resort taller than shoreline rules allowed in the mid-1980s. At 216 feet, it set the mark for downtown. When the city later adopted height limits, the maximum for downtown buildings was set at 220 feet.

The floating green. The golf course's famous 14th green floats on state-owned lake water. In 1987, Gov. Cecil Andrus blocked it until the company agreed to provide public access to Sanders Beach. The company leases the water from the state.

City streets. In 2015, the Coeur d'Alene City Council voted to vacate two downtown streets so the company could plan a second resort tower. One resident told the council it was "time for Coeur d'Alene taxpayers to stop helping fund Hagadone projects." Business groups spoke in favor.

More towers. In 2020, the city's Planning Commission approved a plan for three towers up to 220 feet tall near the resort golf course.

And where it backed off. In 2004, Duane Hagadone proposed closing two blocks of Sherman Avenue for a $20 million memorial garden. He withdrew it days before the City Council was set to finalize an advisory public vote on the idea.

The competition

For decades, the Coeur d'Alene Press had one real rival: The Spokesman-Review. When the Spokesman put staff in Coeur d'Alene in the early 1980s, the Press went to seven days a week. The Spokesman opened a full Coeur d'Alene bureau in 1994. A Press column later called it the "Great North Idaho Newspaper War."

The Spokesman pulled back. It moved its last Coeur d'Alene bureau staff to Spokane in 2017 and later sold its Coeur d'Alene building. Today, Hagadone prints the Spokesman.

Smaller challengers came and went too. In 1995, a rival business paper, the Independent Business Record, launched against Hagadone's North Idaho Business Journal, which answered by adding a second edition each month. On radio, Burl Hagadone started KVNI in 1946, and two Coeur d'Alene stations owned by the family were sold to Spokane's KXLY in 1997.

The Press also carries much of the area's required public notices. The Idaho courts list it as the newspaper for Kootenai County legal notices on name changes, and the city of Athol names it as its official newspaper. We haven't yet checked which paper Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls and the county itself designate.

Other news sources serving the county today include The Spokesman-Review, the Inlander, Spokane's TV stations, the online Kootenai Journal and Kcounty.Media.

What the record doesn't show

We found no evidence that the Hagadone Corporation tells other media outlets what to cover. What the record does show is concentration: one company owns the only daily newspaper based in the county and several surrounding weeklies, prints its longtime rival, and owns key parts of the downtown waterfront that its newspaper covers. The Press does disclose that connection; when it reported on the company's 2020 tower plan, it noted that Hagadone Hospitality and the Press are both divisions of the Hagadone Corporation.

How we did this

This story is based on public records and published reports, listed below. Property figures come from Kootenai County Assessor parcel data as copied from the county's mapping server in July 2024; the county's own server was offline when we checked on Nov. 8, 2026. They count only parcels in company names, not family members' homes, and assessed values are tax values, not sale prices. Kcounty.Media did not ask the Hagadone Corporation for comment for this story. If the company would like to respond, we'll add it.