Electoral defeat tends to spawn bouts of ideological tinkering—when the Democrats lost the presidential election in 2004, a clutch of books soon emerged, bristling with prescriptions for the ailing left. Last year’s resounding losses for the GOP, from John McCain to dog-catcher, will no doubt produce a similar outpouring of what-now books. For some on the right, though, the revolution has already begun, and their catalysts for rethinking conservative politics are a handful of new, online publications.

These new outlets, all of which have cropped up in the last year, are varied in their focus: Big Hollywood examines the nexus of politics and pop culture; The Next Right is a group blog run by political consultants that counsels Republicans on how to run modern campaigns; and The New Majority, launched by David Frum, is a magazine of ideas designed to lead conservatives out of the political wilderness. A fourth new outlet, Culture11, was built for narrative nonfiction and arts criticism, but it folded on January 27 (five months after it launched), a victim of the sharp drop in its investors’ stock portfolios.

So each has its niche, but all share certain important features: they are online-only, more engaged with popular culture than traditional conservative media, and, except for Big Hollywood, eager to challenge conservative orthodoxy whenever necessary. They may make the conservative opinion journalism of tomorrow look a lot like the liberal opinion journalism of yesterday.

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