Fourth Anniversary Bonus Episode

This week marks the fourth anniversary of HUB History.  Listen to this brief bonus track to learn how the show has changed in the past four years, what our most popular episodes have been, and where the show is going in the future.  Be sure to listen to the end for an important announcement about some changes to the show’s format and schedule.


Top episodes of 2020

Top episodes of all time

Transcript

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Jake:
[0:05] Welcome To Hub history, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
This is going to be a bonus episode for our fourth anniversary.
Hi, I’m Jake. Don’t worry. I’m still going to release a real episode this week.
But because this week marks the fourth anniversary of hub history, I want to take the opportunity to look back on the last four years and look forward where the show might be going.
Stick around to the end for an important announcement about some changes to the show.

[0:41] Back in the summer of 2016 my wife, Nikki, and I volunteered at the Shirley Eustis House in Roxbury.
On weekends we had dissolved our walking tour company about two years before, and working as a docent at a historic site a couple of days a week was a good way to keep sharing our love of Boston history.
One afternoon, while we’re waiting for our turn to give a tour, Nikki and I traded weird stories from Boston history back and forth, trying to one up one another.
After a few rounds, one of us said, Hey, we should start a podcast.
And a few months later, this show was born.
We released our first episode in the last week of October and about 30 people listened, that first week, if you told me then that four years later we’d still be podcasting still be coming up with new ideas.
We’d have 2000 listeners a week and that we would have just gotten an award from the Boston Preservation Alliance.
I would have told you to get your head examined.
And yet here we are.

[1:46] In our four years on the air, we’ve had a little over 600,000 unique downloads.
I don’t obsess over our stats week to week, like I used to in the beginning.
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t looked at our numbers and months before getting ready for this episode.
Back at the beginning of the pandemic are download numbers fell off a cliff when everyone stopped driving and taking the tea and going to the gym.
They also stopped listening to podcasts.
We lost between a third and half of our listeners for months.
It wasn’t just us. It happened across the podcast industry, looking at our stats got pretty depressing, so I just stopped.

[2:28] When I looked this week, not only we got in our listeners back, we picked up some new ones.
We’re probably averaging closer to 3000 listeners per episode in the first month of release, up from about 2000 before the pandemic, I noticed that this year our most popular episodes have all been interview shows.
The five that got the most downloads this year were Episode 1 87 where we talked to marathon legend Bill Rogers.
Episode 1 67 Where I interviewed Russ Lopez about the LGBTI Kick History of Boston Episode 1 83. Where Kerri Greenidge told us about black radical William Monroe Trotter Episode 1 84.
My Interview with William Hazel Grove, who wrote a new book about Henry Knox and Episode 1 74 where Nat Sheidley of Revolutionary Spaces talked to us about the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre.
My conversation with nuts seems to have been a big hit, quickly becoming our most downloaded show of all time.

[3:33] Rounding out our all time favorites are my interview with Yale historian Mark Peterson.
I show about the 17 21 SMALLPOX CONTROVERSY The Interview with William Hazel Grove and might debunking of the legend of pirate tunnels in the North End.

[3:49] We officially announced that Nikki was leaving the show to become the executive director of the Old North Church Historic site in late June.
But it’s no secret that she’d stepped back from the show long before that.
In the two years before her departure, I wrote about five shows for each one that Nikki wrote, and in the past year I’ve written 46 episodes and Nikki wrote five.
Since she left, I have, of course, been writing all of them.
None of this is meant as a knock on my wife and co host emerita. She had other plans in mind plans that wound up with her landing a history lover’s dream job in the middle of a global pandemic.

[4:31] What that means for me, though, is a pace of podcast work that’s become increasingly unsustainable.
The longer we keep doing this show, the higher my standards get for historical research, script writing and audio quality that translates into the reality of researching and writing a 10 to 20 page script each week.
I then record for somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours, and then I edit that down into something worth listening to,
that editing process usually takes 2 to 3 times as long as recording does, meaning that a two hour recording session might take five hours of editing to produce a final product. That’s about an hour long.
For example, in last week’s episode about the U. S s Constitution, I said that I had written a 15 page script.
I predicted that that would translate into two hours of recording 4 to 6 hours of editing and would result in an episode of about 45 minutes.
In the end, I recorded for two hours and three minutes, edited for about seven hours, and the final episode was about 48 minutes long.

[5:40] That brings us to the changes I’m making going forward. Simply put, I’m exhausted.
Since Nikki left the show, I’ve dedicated nearly every waking moment when I’m not at work toe working on the podcast.
I can’t remember the last time I got more than four hours of sleep in tonight.
I can’t maintain this level of effort indefinitely, and I have other interests I’d like to get back to pursuing. At some point.
I’m a photographer, kayaker, hiker, a runner, and all that’s been taking a back seat.

[6:13] Over the past month or two, I’ve been taking a hard look at how to keep the show going while still preserving my sanity.
The one thing I don’t want to do is compromise on the quality of the show.
They say that a project can’t be done fast, cheap and well that you have to pick it most. Two of the three, our podcast will always remain free.
I wanted to remain good.
So fast is the one I’m gonna have to sacrifice.
Starting in November, I’m going to make two changes. First, the show will be moving from a weekly release, scheduled a twice monthly.
I think I hope the extra prep time will be enough for me to keep my head above water while still making a show that you want to hear.
After four years of producing a weekly show, this change is a disappointment to me personally.
The only time we’ve missed a week since October 2016 was the week of my father’s memorial service, but I hope you’re going to keep enjoying the podcast even on a slightly curtailed schedule.

[7:18] Along with the schedule change, I’m also making a couple of tweaks to the format, I’ll no longer be including the Boston Book Club in upcoming events segments.
This will mean that the overall show will be a bit shorter, but my stats tell me that very few of you actually listen to both those segments all the way through.
I originally started the show with Segment called This Week in Boston History.
Then, after about a year, we retired that segment and added one featuring a local historic site each week.
That one also lasted about a year before being swapped out for the book club.
The dirty little secret behind all these additional segments is that I added them to the show in the early days when I was afraid that our main stories weren’t long enough.
I’m less worried about that now, And cutting the extra segments that nobody actually listens to is another way to cut down my overhead.
That’s not to say that I’ll never share an interesting book, an upcoming event again, If I stumble across something in my research, I think you’d like to read or watch or listen to. I’ll share it.
Likewise, if there’s a talk or a class that I’m excited about, I’ll share that as well, but I’m not going to give myself an ulcer chasing around books and events every week.

[8:34] I’ve already notified our sponsors and partners about the upcoming changes, but I’m interested in hearing your concerns and your comments.
You can share those with me in all the usual ways you can.
Email podcast that hub history dot com or reach out on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
I’m most active on Twitter, and Nikki mostly manages the other two.
Or just goto hub history dot com and click on the Contact US link.
I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope you’re going to continue to listen. In the meantime, stay safe out there, listeners.

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