Last month I wrote about the demise of Tobacco Reporter magazine whose final print and digital editions were published in December.
I was disappointed because TR had been good to Forest, interviewing me on a couple of occasions and publishing articles about a number of our events including, in that final issue, a piece about our 2024 Smoke On The Water boat party.
The TMA (founded in 1915 as the Tobacco Merchants Association) were the publishers, having acquired the title from SpecComm International, a North Carolina-based publisher and conference organiser, in 2019.
A few days after I wrote 'Stubbed out - world’s oldest tobacco trade magazine to close', I added a postscript, noting that the TMA (not to be confused with the Tobacco Manufacturers Association in the UK) was changing its name again, erasing any reference or allusion to tobacco.
In future it will be known as the Nicotine Resource Consortium.
The new name was duly announced last week in an email that included some rather toe-curling corporate-speak:
This project is more than a rebrand. It is the capstone of a multi-year process to ensure sustainable operations that facilitate the conferences and information you depend upon.
Naturally it includes a new logo, and there will also be a new URL for the new website: nicotine360.org.
So far so interesting. But there's more.
Over the weekend, on LinkedIn, Global Action to End Smoking (formerly the Foundation for a Smoke Free World), posted its support for the proposal by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.
If approved by the incoming Trump administration this would effectively prohibit the overwhelming majority of combustible tobacco products currently on the market in the USA.
The interesting thing is, the president and CEO of the Nicotine Resource Consortium (formerly the TMA and before that the Tobacco Merchants Association), 'liked' GA's post.
What's going on?