The OB Rag Re-Births the San Diego Free Press

Beginning Monday, June 4th, the OB Rag is birthing a new online publication for all of San Diego. It’s called the San Diego Free Press – and is named after San Diego’s very first alternative newspaper – which was published from 1968 to 1969.

The San Diego Free Press will bring to the rest of San Diego what the OB Rag has been bringing to the community of Ocean Beach these last four and half years – an online source of news, issues, and progressive views by citizen journalists, plus the providing of a platform for the discussion of issues relevant to the village of OB.

The San Diego Free Press – in the planning stages for over a year and half – will be a source for neighborhood news from all the ignored and forgotten communities of our area, and it will provide a source and platform for progressive views for and by San Diegans.

The evolution of the OB Rag has been wonderful to experience and observe. First, of course, it was a community newspaper for Ocean Beach during the first half of the 1970s. There was a brief effort in the early days of this century to publish a new paper version, and now we have its current manifestation – the online website.

The staff of the OB Rag believes it is time for us to take another evolutionary step and launch the San Diego Free Press. While the OB Rag will still be published daily, many of our writers and bloggers will now focus on their own neighborhoods and the City and County as a whole. Those of our writers and bloggers who live in Ocean Beach and Point Loma will continue to post their views, reviews, and reports of events and issues that concern OBceans here on the OB Rag. The OB Rag will cross-post articles from the San Diego Free Press and vice-versa.

We want our readers and supporters to fully embrace and welcome the San Diego Free Press. We hope to apply what we learned about providing news and coverage for Ocean Beach to the other villages in and around our City and County. The San Diego Free Press will provide a strong, progressive alternative to the corporate-driven media and press in San Diego. It will be guided by an able and experienced editorial board that will work as a collective, and along with other staff, contributors, and supporters, we aim to forge a new level of citizen journalism in San Diego. We hope to recruit articulate, committed, and compassionate writers, bloggers, and photographers from throughout San Diego’s diverse communities to our new online media project.

We are honored to use the name of the San Diego Free Press. A couple of us remember those heady days of underground newspapers in this town, and so inspired, we went on to create and develop the original OB Rag. Now it seems only fitting those of us who have been publishing the OB Rag and who remember the original are now part of the rebirth of the San Diego Free Press.

Please go here and discover our offspring, our baby – the new San Diego Free Press.