The Workbench legacy

At its core was a visual workflow builder — drag-and-drop steps that fetched data, cleaned it, joined it, and turned it into charts and tables. No code required, no environments to manage, just the work.

Reusable data recipes meant a reporter could share a methodology with a colleague, re-run it next week with fresh data, or fork it for a new story. Every step was transparent and inspectable.

Workbench powered journalism training at Columbia and beyond. The Intro to Data Journalism course taught thousands of students to interrogate data the way a reporter interrogates a source.