Welcome to the best little newspaper in Texas!

The Big Bend Sentinel, founded in Marfa in 1926, now is a labor of love for its current owners, Maria del Rosario Salgado Halpern and Robert Louis Halpern.

I came to work for the paper in 1988. We acquired the Sentinel in 1993, with Rosario coming on board at that time.
During these past years, we’ve taken the paper from cut-and-paste production with scissors, Xacto knives, pica poles, sticky wax, and darkroom photography to digital pagination and this online version.

We’re both Big Bend-area natives, and that gives us an inherent expertise, knowledge and love of its multicultural inhabitants and exquisite terrain as we’ve chronicled our corner of the universe these past 20 years.

Rosario is from Presidio, earned an accounting degree from the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, and worked with several banks and credit unions in Odessa and El Paso where we lived before returning to our roots.

There aren’t many Hispanic women media owners, but Rosario is one of them.

I grew up in Alpine, the son and grandson of pioneer merchants, got my basics at Sul Ross State University and a journalism degree from the University of Texas at El Paso. I worked at the Odessa American (starting with the cop shop and advancing to city editor) and the El Paso Times as an assistant city editor before coming to Marfa.

We have three lovely children, and all have spent time in the newsroom.

Thanks for reading us.
Robert Louis Halpern