The Silverton Standard & the Miner has been sold to Boulder’s Randy Miller, a lifetime newspaperman.
Miller, a former editor who owns a weekly newspaper in suburban Tucson, bought the Standard, along with the Telluride Daily Planet and the Norwood Post in a deal that was finalized Thursday, July 3. 
The Standard is the longest continuously operating business on the Western Slope.
The papers had been owned by Gatehouse Media, a New York conglomerate that publishes nearly 300 papers across the nation. Miller is the former owner of the Colorado Daily, a free paper in Boulder published five days a week. 
Miller also announced last week that the Planet and Standard will get a new publisher, Andrew Mirrington, 37, who is currently director of advertising at the Colorado Daily.
Miller, 56 — a lanky, friendly, highly caffeinated man — is a graduate of the University of Missouri with a masters in journalism.
He bought a small paper in Marceline, Mo., and went on to work at more than a half-dozen newspapers in the West and Midwest as a publisher, owner and editor, including editing a couple of Pulitzer-prize winning photographs at the Detroit Free Press.
In 2001, he bought the Colorado Daily, which he expanded both in terms of pages and revenue before he sold it to its rival paper, the Boulder Daily Camera, in 2005. Last year, he bought the Tucson Explorer, a weekly paper with a circulation of about 50,000.
While many large papers across the country have fallen on hard times, watching their circulation numbers drop and advertisers jump to the Web, Miller said he believes in the future of small, local papers like the Planet, Post, and Standard.
“I really do think local newspapers have a very solid future for years to come,” he said. He intends to make the paper something that appeals to locals and tourists, developers and conservationists alike. “We will represent the interest of the entire community,” he said.
When asked, Miller wouldn’t say how much he paid for the papers, or if there will be changes made to the staff — other than the addition of Mirrington as publisher. While he plans to be a frequent visitor, Miller said he’ll leave the day-to-day business operation of the paper to Mirrington.
After operating a travel company, Andrew Mirrington joined the Colorado Daily nine years ago, and worked his way up from ad salesman to ad director.