Workbench Platform

Workbench Platform operates as an open-source tool designed for data journalism, enabling users to manage the entire data workflow from acquisition to publication without needing to code. It was co-founded by Pierre Conti, who serves as CEO and has a background in documentary filmmaking and design; Adam Hooper, the CTO with experience in journalism and computing; and Jonathan Stray, an advisor and research scholar at Columbia Journalism School with a history of writing for major publications. The platform facilitates scraping, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, with all actions being automatically documented for reproducibility.

The business primarily serves journalists and storytellers, offering them tools to create data-driven narratives. One of its key features is the ability to embed live visualizations into stories, which link back to the source workflow, ensuring transparency for readers. The platform also provides educational resources, including an interactive twelve-part course on data journalism that covers fundamental to advanced techniques. It includes connectors for various data sources like Twitter and Census data, allowing for the retrieval and analysis of real-time information. For instance, users can track tweets from specific users or based on search queries and apply filters to refine the data. The platform is free to use and emphasizes sharing and collaboration, allowing users to duplicate and build upon existing workflows. While the platform itself is open source, it was noted to be a powerful data processing environment upon its public beta release.