fullrun

Peter Kirwan is a journalist and publisher with more than a few years’ experience of the clash of civilizations between media, marketing and technology.Currently, he works as a freelance journalist for The Guardian (Media Guardian if you want to be properly specific), Wired (where he writes The Great Transition, a fortnightly column) and Press Gazette (where he blogs about media finance and business models).

In addition to journalism, Kirwan helps marketing folk to achieve their goals and assists PR agencies to win new business. He delivers presentations on the future of media and runs training courses on the economics and culture of the technology industry. He also researches markets, writes white papers and produces corporate prose. Most of this commercial work is channelled through Fullrun.

Between 2003 and 2009, Fullrun was also a subscription-based web site carrying news and analysis for marketers working in the tech and telecoms industry. The Fullrunner, the site’s weekly newsletter, became required reading for marketers in the industry. As an experiment in paid-for niche publishing on the web, Fullrun was a success: annual subscription renewal rates never fell below 97%.

Between the mid-1990s and 2002, after a short period as editor of the ill-fated glossy monthly Business Age, Kirwan worked in technology publishing, observing the gradual inflation and rapid collapse of the dot.com bubble. He started out as editor of Computing, a 150,000-circulation London-based weekly newspaper for IT professionals published by the now-defunct Dutch media conglomerate VNU. After three years as editor, Kirwan successively become editorial director at VNU and then publisher of Computing.

During the first half of the 1990s, Kirwan worked as a freelance editor of magazines for a range of consumer publishers. He also worked as a writer of film scripts, a book editor, a sub-editor and as a contributor to publications including The Face. Prior to that, he spent two years attempting to complete a postgraduate degree at Indiana University’s School of Journalism, where he studied media law and wrote his thesis on US reporting of Reagan-era armed conflicts in Central America.

A paid-up member of Generation X who wonders what got into the Baby Boomers, Kirwan graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a degree in history. He lives in south London with his wife and three children.