“Rebecca Traister wrote this beautiful line in her New York magazine article at the time, which was like, you look down and suddenly we can see all the scaffolding that we’re standing on,” Ms. Zomorodi said. “And it really felt like that for me.”

Civil, a New York start-up that now aims to help start 100 new journalism outlets by the end of the year, gave Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant grant money that came partly in the form of dollars and partly in the company’s own cryptocurrency, CVL tokens, which will go on sale on Tuesday.

Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant, who worked together for almost three years before starting the new venture, described themselves as creative soul mates.

“We can kind of read each other’s minds,” Ms. Poyant said.

Ms. Poyant is a single mother with a 7-year-old son; Ms. Zomorodi has two children, 11 and 8, and is married to Josh Robin, a political reporter for NY1. The podcast doesn’t shy away from going into how hard it is to be a working parent.

“All of our kids are struggling a little bit right now, with the amount of work time that we are taking for ourselves, often in front of them,” Ms. Poyant said in Episode 3. “There’s a level of guilt that you feel when you’re sitting on a computer and the kids are like, ‘Mom, Mom, Mom,’ and you’re like, ‘I told you I had to work. Go away.’ There’s definitely a sense of like, ‘Is this kid going to, like, remember this as neglect one day?’”

Ms. Zomorodi often records segments for the podcast on the fly. During a trip to upstate New York, she sat with a blanket over her head to record herself while her children were jumping on a trampoline.

“It’s a juggle, and it’s exhausting,” she said.

Ms. Zomorodi got serious about explaining blockchain in the second episode of “ZigZag,” and she did it with the help of a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style jingle sung by the musician and podcaster Martin Zaltz Austwick.