San Diego Past is a new vital source for local history. With a focus on neighborhoods, diverse cultures and fresh perspectives of San Diego’s rich history, this dynamic, informational website is dedicated to becoming a repository on accurate and intriguing regional history.
SanDiegoPast.com is a collaborative website designed to aggregate all the great organizations and information sources for San Diego County history. Our website will feature stories from a wide variety of sources and will be refreshed regularly to form a vibrant and an ongoing narrative about our region. We aim to become a go-to site for historical resources and information for local history buffs, educators and those who want a deeper understanding about the place they call home, while shining the spotlight on organizations such as yours.
There are more than 30 organizations in San Diego County that work to preserve local history. One of our goals is to promote historical organizations to build wider interest in our regional history and their missions. We are asking all San Diego area historical organizations to join us in this effort to bring local history together. We invite you to contribute to San Diego Past with features from your archives or fresh stories. This is an opportunity to bring previously published articles and images in front of the public again, highlighting your mission and your community focus to a new and broader audience. This resource will be free to post and free to view and by recycling your previously researched and/or published items contributing to San Diego Past will not be a burden to your organization.
We believe there is a growing interest to connect with our past and see our region’s history from a wide variety of perspectives. As a participant, your organization will get a direct link from the site. We will also have a direct link to a page with your contributions. We hope you will join us in bringing a fresh look and captivating tales to area readers that will highlight the important work our local history centers are doing.
We are looking for stories of people, places and events that bring a deeper understanding of our past from different angles: the good, the bad and the ugly. We are asking each organization for a commitment of providing one 250-word story with one image on a monthly basis, plus one longer feature story once a year with corresponding images. For smaller organizations that don’t produce articles, we would be thrilled to publish your unique images. All images will be a lower resolution and can be watermarked as well to prevent copyright theft and content will be fully credited to your organization with a link back to your website.
SanDiegoPast.com content will include a blog where your stories and photos will be published, as well as a page listing all San Diego County historical organizations and research resources, photo galleries, a children’s section and the opportunity for readers
to contribute their photos of the past. All of this information will be free to the public, including your organization’s contributions.
We would also like to build an email following to be able to send regular e-newsletters to highlight new content and remind people to take a look at the site.
Eventually our goal is to include subscriptions for those interested in exploring deeper. Subscription content will be produced by our team, will include in-depth features and more. We will notify all organizations when the subscription side of the website goes public.
We recognize that larger organizations may not need our help in promotion, but we are hoping to have all organizations participate for the broadest collection of San Diego history we can produce to form a more complete story of San Diego County’s past.
Please contact us at [email protected] to discuss the next steps. We are happy to answer any questions and share our prototype. We look forward to collaborating with you to bring San Diego’s fascinating history together.
Sincerely,
Leslie Crawford
Martina Schimitschek
Publishers
