Shaheryar Popalzai
Service Lead - Publishing Tech ICFJ at International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)
Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolShaheryar Popalzai is a content strategist and digital transformation leader with a decade of experience reshaping journalism and media tech across Pakistan and beyond. He blends journalism instincts with product-minded innovation, having led newsroom digital overhauls, launched Pakistan’s first interactive news team, and trained 500+ journalists to survive digital disruption. As a multi-year ICFJ-Knight Fellow and speaker at ISOJ, NICAR, and ONA, he has a track record of shipping first-of-their-kind projects (360 video, Facebook Live) and advising major newsrooms on platform and data strategies. In the last phase of his career he pivoted into startup content systems and cybersecurity storytelling, building AI-driven content engines and governance frameworks for venture-backed teams. He co-founded learning and tooling initiatives like Pureversity and Project Shikari, reflecting a passion for tooling that helps journalists surface signals from social data. Based in Karachi, he pairs MBAs in Finance and Business Computing with an atypical creative edge—an obsessive vinyl collector and metalhead whose taste for obscure horror informs unconventional approaches to product and narrative design.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
St Michael's Convent SchoolMBA, Finance, MBA, Finance at Greenwich UniversityBsc (Hons), Business Computing, Bsc (Hons), Business Computing at University of StaffordshireGithub contributions (5)
HacksHackersPakistan/datasets
Aug 2015 - Dec 2015
Contributions:19 commits, 19 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
spopalzai/Bump-o-metre
Sep 2016 - Sep 2016
Contributions:4 pushes in 1 day
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