UNSCRIPTED | EPISODE 374
Kris Oldland, Managing Director of 1927 Media and former founder of Field Service News, joins Sarah Nicastro for a candid conversation about crisis, rebuilding, what B2B publishing gets wrong, and the platform he’s built to fix it.
Kris Oldland spent thirteen years building Field Service News into one of the most recognised voices in the field service industry. In late 2023 he sold it to Copperberg — not entirely by choice. What followed was a period of processing, rebuilding, and eventually designing something new from first principles. The result is 1927 Media: a B2B publishing platform that challenges almost every assumption the industry has made about how content, readers, and solution providers should relate to each other.
The Sale, the Aftermath, and Letting Go
Kris doesn’t shy away from what happened. Financial pressures outside his control, an accountant who let him down, invoices landing in the wrong columns at exactly the wrong time. The details aren’t the point. The point is what he did with them.
The hardest part, he says, wasn’t the loss itself. It was being 90% of the way back and watching the people around him lose faith — while he knew, with complete clarity, that he was on the right path. That gap between self-knowledge and external perception is something most leaders encounter. Very few talk about it this directly.
“You’ve always tried to do things the right way, and everything goes wrong for a short period. The hardest bit is when you’re 90% of the way there and everyone else around you is losing faith. You’ve gotta dig a little deeper. You’ve gotta tell yourself: you know this. You’re on the right path.” — Kris Oldland
What helped was a podcast — deliberately doing the opposite of what his friend John Lamberton’s show usually does. Instead of a success story, Kris told the real one. It was, he says, one of the most healing things he did.
What He Saw When He Stepped Back
One of the most interesting observations in this episode comes from Kris’s time away from writing and speaking publicly. When you stop talking about the future and just watch the industry, the gap becomes visible.
The players change. The characters — and the conversations — often don’t. Companies are still struggling with preventive maintenance. Still debating whether service should be a cost centre. The distance between the boardroom conversation and the plant floor reality remains, he says, genuinely surprising.
“Sometimes our whole job is talking ahead. And then you get into the real world, and you’re like — people are still struggling with preventative, not predictive. People are still struggling with: how do we move from a cost centre? And I’m just falling off my seat.” — Kris Oldland
On the other side of that same observation: AI. Kris makes the point that the technology itself isn’t new to field service. Scheduling algorithms, Darwinian machine learning models, intelligent triage — the industry has been using AI for years. What’s new is accessibility. And what that accessibility has done, above all, is change visibility.
The B2B Publishing Model Is Broken — And Kris Can Prove It
The core problem Kris spent two months mapping — in a white paper he wrote for himself — is one he saw from the inside: B2B publishing serves two masters, and what you need to do to serve one is often at odds with what you need to do to serve the other.
Solution providers pay to reach readers. Readers exchange their data for content. Everyone in the system knows, at some level, that most of those leads won’t convert — the 3% rule suggests only 3% of your target market are actively buying at any given time. That means 97% of lead generation activity is, as he puts it, fishing. The content may be excellent. The association is real. But the transaction underneath it is a form of smoke and mirrors for everyone involved.
“The idea that the audience is a commodity — that’s how every media outlet is geared. And if you stop treating them like a commodity, and you just say: let’s treat both sides equally — it seems so stupidly simple, but nobody’s doing it.” — Kris Oldland
His solution starts from a different premise: what if both the reader and the solution provider were treated as equal participants? Not seller and target, but two parties who have a genuine interest in finding each other at the right moment.
The Platform: 1927 Media and the 5x5 Model
The 1927 Media platform launches in September with 10 focused titles — five vertical (manufacturing, aviation, built environment, heavy industry, energy and utilities) and five functional (including field service, spare parts, pricing, and logistics). Articles that cover a topic relevant to two titles get a double rewrite — appearing in both, with the primary and secondary focus inverted. The intent is to help readers learn from adjacent industries, naturally and without friction.
178+ articles go live simultaneously at launch. Providers can see the editorial calendar, submit commentary in their own words, and be surfaced to readers whose content behaviour signals they’re at the right stage of their journey — without cold outreach, lead forms, or data extraction.
Underpinning all of it is a content gap analysis tool and AI-powered search that maps where each reader is on their knowledge journey — and surfaces what they need next. The AI does everything except the writing. That, Kris is clear, will always be human.
Authenticity as a Competitive Advantage
The thread running through this entire conversation is authenticity — as a value, as a publishing principle, and increasingly as a strategic advantage. In a world where the majority of professional content is AI-generated and largely indistinguishable, the people and platforms that sound like real human beings with a real point of view stand out.
Kris has always had one speed. He is candid about his failures as readily as his intentions, and the audience he’s built over two decades in this industry trusts him for it. That trust is, ultimately, what 1927 Media is built on.
“In the world of AI slop, authenticity is rising to the floor. I’m quite lucky that authenticity is now rising to it.” — Kris Oldland
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