Back in 2023, GBH, one of the public radio stations in Boston, put out a podcast called The Big Dig. Hosted by Ian Coss, the podcast was a deep dive into the infamous, massively expensive project in Boston that tore down an elevated highway and moved it underground.The podcast was wonky, filled with archival tape and intricate finance and policy details. It was also a smash hit, spending weeks on Apple’s top 100 podcasts list and making its way onto multiple best-podcast-of-the year lists.
That success inspired GBH to keep the podcast going, allowing Coss and his producer Isabel Hibbard to do “big digs” into the Massachusetts Lottery and “the Codfather” in the podcast’s second and third seasons. But now the Big Dig is returning to its roots with what Coss calls the “Highway Teardown Tour” of eleven cities around the country: Seattle, Portland, Austin, Louisville, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rochester, Syracuse, Providence, Boston, and New York City. It’s less a new season than an extension of the first one — the new episodes appear under the first season in Apple Podcasts — but using a completely different format. Instead of documentary-style deep-dives, each episode is a recording of a live event hosted by a public radio station in each city, where Coss and a local reporter who has been covering the topic talk through that city’s highway problems and bring on guests to help illustrate some of the paths forward.
There’s also an unusual incentive structure: While the stations hosting events get to keep the revenue from ticket sales and GBH will keep the revenue from the podcast episodes, host stations got the opportunity to put out the event recordings on their own feeds and social channels before the podcast episodes dropped in the Big Dig feed. That way they could make sponsorship revenue of their own off the same tape.
It was, Coss told me, a reminder that public radio stations are “part of a network” (i.e., NPR), and it provided a sense of connection — and a potential revenue source — at a time when public radio is particularly vulnerable. I called up Coss to learn more about the tour, the future of the show, and the importance of archives in his work; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
But to your question about the larger direction for the feed, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. My goal is to keep the focus local, but not necessarily to be parochial and just for people in Massachusetts. Most of our listeners are not in Massachusetts, so for every season we’ve done, the goal is to find a local story that we can tell with a kind of intimacy and granularity that is unique to our team and our archive but can speak to a national audience.
In a funny way, the Big Dig podcast feed has almost been defined by the GBH archives, because what happened is we made this one story about a highway project, and in making it I realized just how much incredible material resides within WGBH. The station turned 75 this year, and it has been recording and archiving audio and video for all of those 75 years. It’s local news, but it’s also Frontline, and Julia Child, and American Experience, and Arthur, and Antiques Roadshow.
There’s so much material in that building; I recently learned the station archive is five and a half petabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.
We did this story about the highway project, which I had at the time thought of as just a one-off, and it did better than any of us who made it had dreamed that it would. And we realized that there was an opportunity to keep going and keep making more of these stories. So my first instinct when the folks at GBH came back to me and said, “Hey, do you have any ideas for other stories?” was to go back to the archives and see what other kinds of stories there might be.
