The attracting and retaining of news media audiences in Iran using lifestyle theory

Audience lifestyle plays an important role in attracting and retaining news media audiences. Lifestyle refers to systematic activities that arise from one's taste. The purpose of this study is to identify the news tastes of Iranian audiences. To this end, 15 professors and media experts were interviewed. Analytical qualitative content analysis of the data showed that the news tastes of Iranian audiences consisted in two components: "habitual" and "instrumental". Given the ordering of news tastes in terms of their importance, audiences ranked "celebrity news", "privacy news", "sports news", " "Local News", "Political News", "Scandal News", "Health News", "Livelihood News", "Accident News" and "Science and Technology News". Due to the importance of news trends, most Iranian audiences have a news trend of "habit", and an "instrumental" view of the news is less common.