From the time we launched the New Majority site, we have had to cope with a problem with our name. Simply put, there are a lot of “New Majorities” out there. There’s one down the road in Virginia, another at the New World Foundation, a conservative 501c4 here, a liberal one there. All this generated serious confusion, but the worst was with the best known New Majority of them all, TheNewMajority in California, because their mission and ours so closely overlapped. That overlap was leading to very unnecessary conflict with people who wanted many of the same reforms that we did.
The best solution seemed to be: a change of name. But to what?
We pondered a wide array of variations: Next Majority, New Politics, Republican Reform, Conservative Comeback. But they all suffered from one or both of two big problems. Either they could mean anything (”New Politics”) or they risked creating a false appearance of official sponsorship where none existed (”Republican Reform”).
We consulted at length with a brilliant friend of mine, one of the nation’s leading experts on branding. Her advice was direct and powerful: ”Nobody knows what the ‘next majority’ will look like. Maybe President Obama will be re-elected and your hopes of building a new modernized Republican majority will go unrealized for a long time to come.” In any event, she continued, whether Republicans return to majority or remain in minority status, the world of internet political commentary is a world built around individual personalities. Think DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost, AndrewSullivan.com, Breitbart.TV. Her advice: Put my name on the thing.
I’ll confess that advice made me very uncomfortable. We’ve been grappling with the problem since the summer, and the main reason it has taken so long to achieve a resolution was my reluctance to go the obvious route.
My reluctance was based on two grounds.
1) NewMajority.com has been a collective undertaking and a work in progress. We are not here to substitute some new orthodoxy for the conservative orthodoxies of the past, but instead to develop creatively some positive and responsible new approaches. Any new title had to emphasize that this is an open-ended group project, not a one man band.
2) Conservatism’s sojourn in the wilderness is likely to be a long one, and the work of this site will probably have to continue past the point at which I am the right person to do it. The generation now in its 20s is the one that will lead the successful transformation of conservatism. Which means that the daily management of this site will need fairly soon to be handed off to new leadership with new names.
And yet it was also unanswerable that for the time being, at least, I’m the person with responsibility for this site and this project, and that it is shaped and defined for better or worse by my thoughts and my words.
The name we all eventually settled on, after a canvass of opinions, was FrumForum: Frum because that’s who the editor is, Forum because my job is as much or more to create a venue for the opinions of others as it is to express my own.
Starting today, we’ll operate the site both here at NewMajority.com and also at FrumForum.com. We’ll complete a full conversion to the FrumForum location over the next six months. I hope you’ll adjust your bookmarks – and any citations – accordingly.
I hope to see you return often to the renamed site!
15 responses so far
1 ottovbvs // Nov 2, 2009 at 9:29 am
……..Based on a good few years in strategic planning and marketing with an oil major, I’d say your brilliant friend is probably right. It’s early days and the NM moniker, which as you say doesn’t mean much and is already in use elsewhere, hasn’t gained much traction, or brand equity to use the technical term, so you have the luxury of making a change. Simply put “David Frum” is currently more famous than the “New Majority” so it’s a definite addition of strength in that the whole thing becomes much more mutually self reinforcing than heretofore……….Interesting that you are sufficiently realistic to recognize the sojourn in the wilderness is likely to be of some duration. You may want to think about how that reality is going to shape the editorial positioning on diaries. There’s an awful lot of boilerplate spin and extreme doctrinaire partisanship here that I can’t see being very attractive to middle of the road independants who the GOP needs in order to rebuild its fortunes……….Anyway good luck with the new branding.
2 MI-GOPer // Nov 2, 2009 at 11:10 am
David, best of luck on the change in direction and I hope you’re able to keep or attract a better stable of writers to a flag which will now be more clearly about you and less about a dialogue in a niche in the political blog-o-sphere.
Hey, maybe someday there will be Frum-groupies! You’ve got the FrumScrum and the FrumForum… but you have a long, long way to go before you have the personae presence of someone like Bill OReilly or AndieCooper. Maybe t-shirts and baseball caps are next? A door mat?
Given the quality and high incidence of Democrat trolls here, I’d recommend you go with personalized airtravel barf bags… on the outside it could read: “Open and have Democrats deposit their opinions here”? Nawh, that’s probably not a good marketing idea… accurate, but not good.
3 HiHo // Nov 2, 2009 at 11:53 am
Given the usual meaning of “frum”…You might get a fair number of Orthodox Jews here, wondering what all of this has to do with anything.
But that may not be such a bad thing.
4 WSJ misses the point, and Rush is right » Cold Fury // Nov 2, 2009 at 12:39 pm
[...] The New Majority — ain’t. [...]
5 Sabba Hillel // Nov 2, 2009 at 1:47 pm
HiHo:
You are correct. I came here because I thought that this would be part of the movement of religious Jews to the (political) conservative wing. Of course, the religious connotation of “Conservative” is actually the equivalent of what the “moderate” democrats are to politics. But then again, religious definitions fall into the range of
Anyone to the left of me is a heretic
Anyone to the right of me is a fanatic.
6 James Cody // Nov 2, 2009 at 2:12 pm
If it’s not too late to give suggestions, I would suggest something with the phrase “Bull Moose” in it (e.g., Bull Moose Majority, Bull Moose Forum, Bull Moose Reform, or something along those lines). I think that phrase does at least three things. (1) It conveys what type of majority you hope to build: a primarily conservative majority, but one based on common sense and first principles, not ideology, and one open to moderate and even progressive ideas, as long as the ideas have substantive merit. (2) It contrasts with what you are not. For whatever deranged reason, conservatives seem to hate Teddy Roosevelt. For example, they set Teddy Roosevelt as the type of conservatism they do not follow (e.g., George Will seems to be overly fond of saying how Taft was the real conservative and Roosevelt was not a true conservative). At the same time, while providing a contrast with what you are not, I don’t think Teddy Roosevelt is an offensive image that sticks a knife in your conservative opponents’ eyes and angers them, the way a name like the New Olympia Snowe Majority might (or, quite frankly, the way Frum Forum might, which says more about Hugh Hewitt and gang than you). And (3), by going back to history and an important figure in America, it also conveys the level of intellectualism involved in what you are trying to do and that this is a movement about the mind, not visceral, emotional, gut beliefs (e.g., not to be snarky, but I doubt that Sarah Palin, Michelle Bauchmann, Sean Hannity, etc would even know what Bull Moose refers to).
7 What Does David Frum’s New Majority Name Change Say About the Conservatism he Advocates? « NewsReal Blog // Nov 2, 2009 at 4:33 pm
[...] today, NewsReal’s sparring partner David Frum announced he would change the name of his website from New Majority into Frum Forum. It was illustrative of [...]
8 Toddtheconservative // Nov 3, 2009 at 8:23 am
When you google the new name, some weirld Muslim thing comes up. I hope this doesn’t mess you up with Google. I love this new name. People will know just what it is now. Hey did you guys see this cool video C. Rich put up? I can’t believe she is in the news again.
http://americaspeaksink.com/2009/11/debra-lafave-gets-justice/
9 The Frumington Post? The Frumdge Report? Fruming Points Memo? The Frumy Beast? « Around The Sphere // Nov 3, 2009 at 4:26 pm
[...] David Frum explains: From the time we launched the New Majority site, we have had to cope with a problem with our name. Simply put, there are a lot of “New Majorities” out there. There’s one down the road in Virginia, another at the New World Foundation, a conservative 501c4 here, a liberal one there. All this generated serious confusion, but the worst was with the best known New Majority of them all, TheNewMajority in California, because their mission and ours so closely overlapped. That overlap was leading to very unnecessary conflict with people who wanted many of the same reforms that we did. [...]
10 Oneon1isto // Nov 4, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I’ll still stop by for some different perspectives, regardless of the name.
Although for God sakes, could someone make the new logo transparent? Come on.
11 Secular Right » New Majority → FrumForum // Nov 4, 2009 at 5:07 pm
[...] the explanation for the change in name. When I saw a page notifying of the change last night on NewMajority I [...]
12 NewMajority.com has rebranded … « David Kirkpatrick // Nov 4, 2009 at 7:02 pm
[...] NewMajority.com has rebranded … Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, et.al. — Tags: conservative political philosophy, David Frum, FrumForum.com, GOP, marketing, NewMajority.com, rebranding — davidkirkpatrick @ 6:02 pm … to FrumForum.com. [...]
13 Rich Muny // Nov 4, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Digg at http://digg.com/politics/David_Frum_s_NewMajority_com_is_now_FrumForum
14 Tucker’s hiring for new site | Obama Biden White House // Nov 5, 2009 at 8:20 pm
[...] who’s worked for the RNC, Roll Call, and earlier this year, New Majority (before it became FrumForum), has signed on as an [...]
15 When you’re “more seasoned…” « DC Works // Nov 9, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] who’s worked for the RNC, Roll Call, and earlier this year, New Majority (before it became FrumForum), has signed on as an [...]
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