Empowerment on the agenda.

4 min readFeb 23, 2022

Two years ago this week, on Feb. 25, 2020, Turbine Labs began publishing the “Coronavirus Daily Briefing,” an executive summary of the most relevant and impactful news on the nascent pandemic. Now called the “Future of Work Executive Briefing,” we continue to publish every weekday.

Tomorrow we will publish the 500th edition of the briefing. Our data journalists have leveraged the Turbine Labs platform to cover every aspect of how Covid-19 has impacted our economy, schools, mental health, work and careers, culture, and more. In the 7+ years of leading Turbine Labs, it is one of the initiatives I am most proud of.

Mass media: How many English-language print articles were published on the topic of COVID-19 in January 2020? (answer below)

I continue to hear from people every month how this one 5-minute read is their news source in the morning. Not their Covid news source, or their return-to-work news source — their sole news source in the morning.

The briefing has connected us with a community of individuals who want to feel empowered by information rather than at the mercy of it. It allowed us to prove to an audience of thousands that no matter where you stand politically, we can have mutual trust in information. This is possible because our team had no other agenda than to keep our readers accurately informed — and through that — safer, healthier, and less overwhelmed.

At the mercy of… the checkout stand? The gum at the checkout stand can tempt us no more, we’re too busy texting. Since the release of the iPhone in 2007, global gum sales have decreased by how much? (answer below)

Demand this much — and more — from all the news you consume and from the sources where you consume it. If we all demand that news organizations’ agendas be nothing more than to inform us truthfully and objectively, then the media will change for the better. And along with it our attitudes towards each other. I believe this. No really… I do.

I’m incredibly proud of and grateful to our team of data journalists who get up each morning and work so hard to make a tiny dent in our division and skepticism. 500 times over.