Farewell, Journalism
After three years as a Senior Front-End Developer at Il Fatto Quotidiano, I am joining Publicis Sapient as a Manager Experience Engineering, where design excellence meets engineering and technology. A natural convergence for someone who studied industrial, multimedia communication and interaction design and spent twenty years building digital products.
After three meaningful years spent in the “engine room” of news, I am saying goodbye to my journey as Senior Front-End Developer at Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Working in a newsroom has been an intense and formative experience, strengthening my sense of responsibility toward information and the social role of media. It also allowed me to witness firsthand the fracture between the editorial models of the past and the technological needs of the future.
On April 1st, I will begin a new chapter at Publicis Sapient as a Manager Experience Engineering — a role where design experience excellence meets engineering and technology.
I studied as an industrial designer, multimedia communication designer, and interaction designer, and I have worked as a technologist for about twenty years. At Publicis Sapient, these threads come together: communication and technology, design and digital transformation, in a new era in which AI is changing the way digital products are conceived and built.
If I think about where this instinct begins, I think of the affiches of 1890s Paris — when artists like Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used color lithography to turn the urban street into a mass medium. Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for the Moulin Rouge demonstrated that commercial communication could be both functional and artistically powerful. It was, in a sense, the birth of graphic design as a discipline that bridges art and commerce — craft and reproduction, message and reach.
Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet is a node along that same line. He founded Publicis in Paris in 1926, at just twenty years old, and pioneered the use of new media — from radio to cinema — as vehicles for commercial communication. That instinct to meet audiences where technology takes them is the same instinct I recognize in myself. That convergence of craft and technology is still the work.
This post also marks the Season Finale of “Sounds New” — my series on the economics of digital publishing, told through the borrowed language of music, industry, and craft. The questions I explored there remain open, and I remain confident that organizations like Il Fatto Quotidiano can evolve to meet them. But my path now continues elsewhere.
I will keep tracing it here, through posts about work and technology.
Grateful for the past, curious for the future.
Onward.