Twitter: @petekirwan
Email: peter[DOT]kirwan[AT]fullrun[DOT]com
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. Fullrun’s weekly newsletter The Fullrunner became required reading for marketers in the industry. As an experiment in paid-for niche publishing on the web, Fulrun 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.
Kirwan graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a history degree. He lives in south London with his wife and three children
After six years of running Fullrun as a paid subscription site for tech marketers and PRs, it’s time for a change. The paywall is gone. Although Fullrun will continue to run consultancy engagements and training courses, it’s increasingly likely that you’ll see my copy elsewhere on the open web.
Why change? The biggest reason is entirely predictable. Writing and editing a paid subscription site started to feel like being locked inside a box, shouting my head off. Without linkage, life got dull. The craving for interaction became too much. It was time to tear down the paywall.
A second reason has much to do with the way in which tech marketing has evolved. Consolidation and slower growth rates have become the norm across much of the industry. As a result, marketing in the tech industry is becoming less unique, more like what happens elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with this (maturity has its benefits). But it does suggest that there is less need for a niche source of information on what tech marketers are doing and how they are doing it.
In publishing terms, niches change: as new ones emerge, older ones merge with broader markets. On this basis, from the start, Fullrun’s paid subscription approach was always intended as an experiment. I launched the original site in 2003, at a time when the publishing industry had started to despair about the future of ad-supported sites.
Ironically, I find myself tearing down the paywall at a time when the same doubts are circulating again. Talk of paid content is everywhere. It seems inconceivable that subscription-based content won’t play a bigger role in publishing in the future.
For what it’s worth, my experiment worked. Fullrun’s potential audience of marketers and PRs in the tech industry numbered a few thousand. For six years, several hundred of those marketers and PRs subscribed to Fullrun.
They did so with incredible loyalty. Year after year, subscription renewal rates averaged 97%.
Running Fullrun as a subscription-based site confirmed something that I long suspected when I worked inside B2B publishing. No matter how good your content, the popularity of compelling events will always just as great.
I’ve been inviting leading tech journalists and bloggers to discuss their work in front of PRs at our Talking Shop events for the past six years. Potentially tetchy and perennially fascinating, these events were always extremely popular: but now that I’m stepping outside the paywall to resume my own journalistic career, it seems like the right time to bring down the curtain on them.
As you can probably tell from this web site, Fullrun will continue to offer consultancy and training courses. I’ll continue to be available for roundtables, panels and speaking engagements where the subject matter involves the continuing clash of civilizations between media, marketing and technology.
It remains for me to thank everyone who supported and encouraged Fullrun in its paid subscription incarnation. Onwards and upwards, eh?