A personal finance podcast that uses voice mail

Ricardo Bilton  of the Nieman Lab writes about Kitchen Table Politics, a personal finance podcast from FiveThirtyEight.com.

Bilton writes, “The episodes, airing over the next five weeks, will follow specific personal finance issues that nearly every American faces at some point. The first episode looks at childcare and paid family leave. Future episodes will examine higher education, jobs, healthcare, and retirement. (The series will run within the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast feed.)

“‘Our audience is already very policy-minded and able to deal with high-level policy and economics discussion, but we also want to make sure that the human stories are there, too, because that’s the connection we’re trying to make,’ said Farai Chideya, the show’s host. ‘There’s a key aspect to all of this that’s about our everyday lives, and it’s important to make that connection in a very visceral way.’

“To ground the policy discussions in the concerns of real people, Kitchen Table Politics set out to hear from listeners directly. Ahead of the show’s launch, the producers set up a dedicated phone number that people could call to share their stories and perspectives about each week’s topics. For each episode it offers a simple, but open-ended prompt, the responses to which are excerpted and discussed by the show’s hosts and guests.”

Read more here.