Pier Paolo Bozzano

Editorial Technology Leader | Cross-Disciplinary Product Strategist | 15+ Years Bridging Journalism & Engineering

I transform editorial workflows through technology, designing platforms that streamline newsroom operations while enhancing user engagement and operational efficiency. As a rare professional who combines deep journalism expertise with hands-on technical development, I solve complex problems at the intersection of editorial strategy, user experience, and software engineering.

Core Value Proposition:

Editorial Technology Innovation: Architect custom CMS platforms, APIs, and editorial UX systems that directly impact newsroom productivity and audience engagement

Cross-Functional Leadership: Bridge communication gaps between editorial teams, product managers, and engineering, ensuring technical solutions align with journalistic goals

Data-Driven Storytelling: Leverage user insights and analytics to optimize content strategy and audience retention.

Professional Experience Highlights:

At Il Sole 24 Ore's North American bureau, I evolved from a reporter covering U.S. politics and finance to leading technical initiatives including wire service management, custom CMS development, and editorial workflow optimization. This transition exemplifies my ability to identify operational challenges and architect technical solutions.

Currently contributing to mission-driven organizations including the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance and The Trust Project, focusing on transparency tools and journalism quality frameworks.

Technical Competencies:

Development: API design, CMS architecture, editorial workflow automation
Product Management: User research, requirements gathering, stakeholder alignment
Editorial Systems: Content management, publishing workflows, newsroom operations
Analytics: User engagement metrics, content performance optimization

Unique Differentiator:

My 15-year cross-disciplinary journey has created a rare skillset that translates between editorial and technical teams. I understand both the urgency of breaking news and the complexity of scalable software architecture, enabling me to lead projects that others might find technically challenging or editorially unfocused.

Current Focus: Seeking opportunities where editorial technology leadership, product innovation, and cross-functional collaboration drive meaningful impact in media, journalism, or content-driven organizations.

Available for full-time roles, consulting engagements, or strategic advisory positions. Contact: pierpaolo [dot] bozzano [at] gmail [dot] com

Portfolio

Cuttings from my archive.

Recent Web Design & APIs

Buffalo's Fire

Backend: WordPress, Strapi
Frontend: Next.js

The Trust Project Network

Backend: Strapi
Frontend: Next.js

The Trust Project Documentation

Backend Strapi
Frontend: Next.js

Subhead.co.uk

Backend Strapi
Frontend: Next.js

Il Sole 24 Ore first mobile edition, concept (2013)

User experience design

Il Sole 24 Ore Mobile, approved design (2014)

User experience & graphic design

Il Sole 24 Ore Mobile, engagement through personalization (2019)

User flow & personalization logic

Content Innovation Lab Gruppo 24 Ore

The Content Innovation Lab was the research and prototyping unit of Il Sole 24 Ore, combining editorial, technical, and marketing expertise to explore the future of content production. The lab focused on rapid experimentation—developing new applications, editorial tools, and business models within 100-day cycles. Its mission was to identify and test frontier technologies—from AI and automation to personalized content delivery—always with a lean, cross-disciplinary approach.

During its operation, the lab secured over €1 million in funding from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund to support projects like Royalty, a personalization system for digital news products, and AI Anchor, a tool for generating automated audio journalism. These initiatives aimed to rethink how information is structured, distributed, and monetized—placing user satisfaction, editorial quality, and internal efficiency at the center of innovation. The lab maintained offices in Milan, Rome, and New York, and played a key role in scouting, benchmarking, and adapting emerging technologies to the needs of a legacy newsroom.

Royalty

Royalty lets journalists and AI work side by side to create a deeply digital newspaper that is personalized for each user.

Royalty is a product of deeply digital organizational and process thinking, introducing high tech to support high-value news staff and ensure high value in all the forms of our content. The result is a new breed of digital newspaper, one that delivers content in a highly personalized format to the readers, each with their particular preferences about the time, place, interests and formats they care about.

Machine learning and personalization are services increasingly accessible to more kinds of organizations and data. Royalty emphasizes a more direct and controlled relationship between our content creators and our content consumers. The system takes high-level human input and translates it into a new internal high-level 'deeply digital' news format that can be processed at a more symbolic level and allows to differentiate the way we serve content.

AI Anchor

AI Anchor, a system aimed at generating automated audio segments from structured data in ‘live radio’ quality.

Radio 24 is the first and only private "news & talk" radio station in Italy and the natural place to develop the first AI anchor with the goal of one day going on the air with an entirely automated news segment. The AI anchor’s career will begin, however, with an internship and it will take time and a long trial for it to be ready for prime time. The initial task of our AI anchor will be to generate news podcasts on demand based on preferences chosen by users on our website and app. The project combines a mighty editorial effort to create tools to translate structured data in content, the use of AI to aid in the process and a trial-and-error approach in the field of text-to-speech. Technology plays an important role in the project that at the same time focuses on the craftsmanship of experienced journalism. Why do we need to bring AI in our newsroom? Ultimately, the development of automated journalism will depend on advances in the wider field of AI. Self-learning software could eventually lead to breakthroughs in data mining and make it much easier to work with unstructured data. We believe the time is now for our first virtual anchor to come up through the ranks.

Content Innovation Lab it/en site

Design & implementation (CakePHP, Sass, HTML)

Did I mention modular journalism?

User-first design thinking

It begins here and continues here.

Salsify and Post CMS

Salsify and Post CMS were two integrated systems developed in tandem to support editorial and publishing workflows for vertical products at Il Sole 24 Ore. Salsify handled frontend rendering and high-speed caching, using a custom server-side rendering setup built before frameworks like Next.js were common. It prioritized performance, flexible layouts, and structured content delivery optimized for SEO.

Post CMS served as the backend platform, designed specifically for newsroom usability. It offered a clean, distraction-free writing interface, collaborative editing tools, schema.org-driven metadata, smart tagging, integrated media (Imagex, AP), and granular role-based publishing controls. Together, the two systems created a fast, content-aware, and adaptable environment tailored for remote editorial teams.

While we explored the possibility of commercializing the platform, it ultimately remained an internal solution. Still, it stands as a key project in designing and deploying scalable, semantically structured editorial infrastructure from the ground up.

The project was developed with the awesome dudes at Elytex Systems.