SILVERTON - Mark Esper, editor and publisher of the Silverton Standard & the Miner, used to report in war-torn Bosnia and Northern Ireland.
"It was good preparation for Silverton," he said.
Journalists - irritating, imperfect, insatiable and ungrateful - are despised everywhere and perhaps nowhere more than in small towns, where there is no social buffer between reporters and the people they sometimes unsparingly write about.
The Standard, based in Silverton, a stunning mountain hamlet with a year-round population of about 600, is the oldest paper in Colorado. Since Esper took it over in 2009, it has won more Colorado Press Association awards than Esper can count.
Every week, Esper produces the paper basically by himself, doing all of the reporting, editing, editorializing, much of the photography and some of the advertising sales. On Thursday mornings, he drives to Durango before dawn to fetch it fresh off the presses and delivers it by hand in Silverton.
Reporting is grueling, stressful, often demoralizing work. Right now, life is stark for Esper, whose uncompromising stories about Silverton's city government have plunged the town into a rancorous, still-unfolding scandal that was sparked by one city employee fulminating about another city employee at a bar in the early morning hours.
"I editorialized that if you fire someone for what they say about their boss at a bar at 1 a.m., everyone in town would be fired," Esper said. "But since this thing blew up, I've been slammed by both sides. It's gotten tough recently."
As he told the story while working in his office, a reader suddenly entered to tell Esper in no uncertain terms that one faction embroiled in Silverton's ongoing dispute was made up of damnable liars.
In person, Esper is bracingly intelligent, with a veteran reporter's steel-trap memory for old, colorful details, a wicked, sardonic sense of humor, weakness for cigarettes and an unabashed love for gossip.
Since Esper initially reported the bar comments, Silverton Board of Trustees launched an investigation into the boozy tirade, a city employee has been fired and a city council member is facing recall.
A visit to Silverton showed the town to be convulsed by the affair.
Interviews with several Silverton residents about Esper were cut off when their neighbors - whose enemy political affiliations were well-known - emerged to rake leaves and collect mail - meaning, spy on them.
Esper acknowledged the difficulty and the pleasure of reporting in Silverton.
"The freedom is great, as is the sense of accomplishment. I don't miss editors. But I do miss the camaraderie of the newsroom. It's a little lonely," he said. "I don't get out much."
The Standard's headlines are, unfailingly, a joy to read:
"Parking ticket is swiped by crow"; "Mystery chicken has lots of pluck"; and "Shocker! The Bigfoot Hunt May Not Be Real!"
But in addition to thoroughly charming parade, school and Fourth of July coverage, the Standard unstintingly covers serious issues, including an ongoing environmental catastrophe caused by mine drainage and lack of adequate health-care delivery.
Earlier this year, Esper reported on the killing of Jessica McFarland, a hometown girl whose hometown husband, Michael McFarland, was subsequently charged with murder.
When the Standard published a photo of police carrying McFarland's body out of her home in bag - often a routine news decision at a some metropolitan papers - town residents raged at Esper, who quickly took the photo down from his website. Far from being heartless, he spent nights worrying about the role he played in breaking Silvertonians' hearts.
San Juan Historical Society's Bev Rich acknowledged the difficulty of being a one-man news operation in a one-newspaper town, where readers hold the paper spiritually responsible for the things it reports happening.
"He deals with it pretty well. He's interviewed (Fidel) Castro! But he does get upset sometimes, when people on both sides are mad at him. The town blames him for its mess; people yell. I just tell him: There are a bunch of quiet people here who think you're doing the best job in the world."
Silverton resident Casey Carrol said, "everybody in this town gives (Esper) a hard time. But have you ever seen an editor work as hard? I get up early, and at 5 in the morning, I'll see Mark trudging through the snow, huddled down, delivering papers. He hasn't had a vacation in seven years."
Resident Freddie Canfield said Silverton's discontented residents "get all wrapped about things, and Mark's the axle, the nitroglycerine in a situation that's highly explosive. That's just the way it is. Up here, it's a remote and hostile environment."
"You can tell he has bad days. We do rely on him to get the correct information out there - even if he needs a proofreader desperately," she said. "But if anything goes on in town, he knows, and it's in that paper. He works 24/7. He's single, and he'll be single forever because no wife would put up with it."
A well-traveled journalist
Mark Esper started working at the Silverton Standard & the Miner seven years ago after working as a copy editor for Traverse City Record-Eagle, a Michigan paper with a circulation of almost 30,000.
He grew up in Flint, Michigan, and attended Eastern Michigan University, where he got his start writing for 'Bowling for Columbine' director Michael Moore at Moore's Michigan Voice newspaper.
'That was before he got famous,' Esper said.
In his long career, Esper has worked at weekly and daily newspapers in Michigan, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico, traveled to 53 countries, reported from Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Central America, Cuba and the Middle East, interviewed Fidel Castro, been featured on ABC's 'Good Morning America' while in Havana and has won dozens of Colorado Press Association awards.
In 2009, he was a finalist for The Washington Post's Next Great American Pundit Contest, finishing eighth in a pool of 5,000 entrants.
Esper loves history, especially World War I and the Balkans.
Chase Olivarius-McAllister
An earlier version of this story erred in saying Mark Esper was college roommates with Michael Moore.
The Silverton Standard's history
The Silverton Standard & the Miner is the oldest newspaper in Colorado, but it has two birthdays. The Weekly Miner was established in 1875, and the Silverton Standard first published in 1889.
For much of the 20th century, the Standard was the dominant newspaper in the Southwest. A Sept. 21 headline in the 1901 edition of the Standard proclaimed, 'DURANGO TO BE A SILVERTON SUBURB: Silverton is destined to become a city with Durango as a suburb.'
But the newspaper's fortune reversed. During the most recent recession, the Standard almost went under because of financial losses. At the time, GateHouse Media - a New York-based media conglomerate - owned it. The company tried to sell it, but when it couldn't find a buyer, it said it would cease production.
Salvation came when the San Juan Historical Society took it over.
Now, under Esper's stewardship, the Standard has rebounded.
It has 900 subscribers and sells a couple hundred more copies in the racks.
'Sixty percent of our subscribers are out of state. A lot of them are train people, or people who are interested in the history of mining or the Southwest or Silverton for whatever reason,' Esper said. 'One guy in Norway started subscribing, for whatever reason.'
An inmate in a California prison tried to subscribe a few years ago because he was trying to figure out if he wanted to live in Silverton once he was released.
'It turns out he was a pretty serious sex offender. So I sent him back his money,' Esper said.
