Identifing Drivers Affecting the Future of Newsagencies in Iran

The speed of changes in today's world caused domestic agencies requiring Future Studies for surviving and staying on the field. In this study, using the Delphi technique as a Future Studies method, we identify drivers affecting the futures of Iran's newsagencies. Participants in this study were 18 experts specializing in the field of communications, media management, news and Future Studies and in three rounds of Delphi, we could achieve consensus about 21 drivers identified. The drivers were classified into four categories: derivers of technology, legal, political, economic, socio-cultural and economic. The drivers included; derivers of technology: media convergence, new forms of content, speed up the production of news, more intelligent information acquirement manner, expanding bandwidth, next-generation of website. The political-legal drivers: financial dependence to political movements, intellectual property of news and media productions, media monopoly broken. The drivers of socio-cultural: the development of media literacy, globalization, generational change, change in the concept of privacy, partition of audience's attention, move to the regional and local issues, thoughts intensification, social fragmentation, media citizen. Economic drivers: speed and agility in the face of official productions, changing from the virtual nature wealth to the real ones, planning on the basis of economy.