Managing Editor — PastPort

Location: Remote or hybrid; we’re based in Boston, MA

Type: Full-time

Salary: $80,000–$105,000, plus equity. Range reflects experience.

Apply: [email protected]

About PastPort

PastPort is an early-stage company building augmented-reality history experiences for the places where history happened. Our first catalog covers Boston, where sixty historical figures now appear on location along and beyond the Freedom Trail, and we’re preparing for public beta. The company grew out of three decades of service on the board of the Freedom Trail Foundation and a conviction that history becomes far more compelling when you encounter the people who made it. We’re building toward experiences in Concord, Salem, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and London.

The work

A visitor raises a phone on the street where something happened, and the person who did it appears and speaks for one to four minutes. We build these encounters in sets of 15 to 40 — a route through a place, a period, or a story.

If you have written wayside exhibits, audio tour scripts, gallery text, or first-person interpretation, you have already done the hard part of this job. You know how long a visitor will stand still, how to write for someone who is looking at a thing rather than at a page, and how to sequence stops so the fifteenth still lands. That experience is what we’re hiring for.

We’re looking for our first Managing Editor to own three things:

• Experience design. Which figures, which moments, which sequence — the plan for an experience before any content gets made, including how geofencing shapes what a visitor encounters and in what order.
• Editorial standard. Scripts and components that are accurate, dramatically alive, and consistent in voice across a growing catalog. An encounter is closer to a short monologue than to a label, and it has to be right and hold someone standing on a sidewalk.
• Historical accuracy. Recruiting and managing the author historians who supply the scholarship and the review historians who verify it. Accuracy is the product, and this role owns it.

You’ll also help market what you make, and you’ll work directly with the CEO day to day while the function is being built.

About the AI part

Our production pipeline is AI-driven: it generates the portrait, the voice, and the animation, and drafts the script from a brief. That has two consequences worth being clear about.

The first is that you do not need to be a video producer. There is no crew, no shoot, and no edit suite. If the reason you’ve never worked in this medium is that production was out of reach, it isn’t anymore.

The second is that we are very serious about having human gates.  Public historians who read and renovate the drafts and a Managing Editor who catches the anachronistic detail, wrong period architecture, delivery that lands as uncanny rather than human, and confident claims that no source supports. We want people with real reservations about these tools and the judgment to act on them, not someone who thinks the pipeline is finished work.

What we’re looking for

Roughly 6–10 years of relevant experience. We care about the shape of it more than the number. Strong candidates often come from interpretation and exhibitions at museums or historic sites, audio tour and museum app production, museum theatre and first-person interpretation, editorial roles in publishing or media, or exhibit content development at design firms.

What matters, from wherever you got it:

• You’ve owned a repeating production process with contributors you didn’t manage on an org chart
• You have editorial judgment on nonfiction narrative, and you send back work that’s merely serviceable
• You’ve worked with academic historians without either deferring entirely or ignoring them
• You have a demonstrated relationship with historical material and the instinct to check a claim rather than assume it
• You’re comfortable building in an early-stage company where the processes don’t exist yet

To apply

Email [email protected] with your resume and a writing sample: a 200-word speech by a historical figure, written for a public history audience. Pick whoever you like. The sample is the job in miniature — it’s the same problem you’d solve every week here.