The needs of natural disasters victims to media (case study: the victims of Azerbaijan earthquake)

Numerous studies have been conducted about the role of media during a crisis. Accordingly diverse functions have been defined for media while in crisis. By applying a prescriptive viewpoint to derive mass media functions, most of the studies have been the based on the opinions of experts and the opinions of the victims have rarely been taken into consideration. For the first time, we have directly talked to the victims to find out their media needs. For the purpose of this study we visited people in Varzaghan and Tabriz, two days after 2012 earthquake in Eastern Azerbaijan and gathered our data by using 27 ethnographical interviews. We used grounded theory to analyze the data. Using open, axial and selective coding of the data, we arrived at four main media needs of the victims including need for information, need for media attention, need for education and need for having representative.