Keyword – Dewey

Sebestyén, Attila:

Advocacy through Owned Journal

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the era of fortnightly trade journals, advocating different professional groups, was thriving in the Hungarian hospitality industry. So far, I have focused my research only on one journal, Kávésok Lapja (“Café Owners’ Journal”). In this paper, I reveal the lessons of an even narrower material, by picking up just a couple of articles. My aim is to expand and exemplify with historical precedents the following thesis statement: the owned trade journal is an appropriate platform for realising a twofold function. On the one hand, it is capable of providing an integrative framework for the inner stakeholders/public of an organization or an industry. On the other hand, through the trade journal, an interest group may prove to outside audiences its reasoning abilities and openness to debate, which are the prerequisites of turning one’s own topic into a public affair. To establish my thesis statement, I use some considerations from Walter Lippmann’s and John Dewey’s theories of the public. Besides, my argument is linked to a couple of insights based on the literature on advocacy journalism.

Keywords: advocacy journalism, Café Owners’ Journal, Dewey, Lippmann, publicity, trade journals