Conceptualizing Sustainable Media: An Integrated Model for Environmental Journalism in Iran

The climate crisis and environmental degradation have intensified ecological, social, and economic challenges in Iran, increasing the need for environmental communication that supports public engagement, policy development, and long-term environmental governance. However, environmental reporting remains largely episodic and constrained by political, legal, organizational, and professional limitations. This study develops an empirically grounded conceptual model of sustainable media using a grounded theory approach based on interviews with Iranian journalists, media managers, documentary filmmakers, communication scholars, and environmental experts. The findings conceptualize sustainable media as a model comprising causal, contextual, intervening, strategic, and consequential components. The model proposes that sustainable media can be maintained through the interaction of institutional capacities, including legal protection, economic independence, organizational resilience, scientific expertise, and professional development, with communicative capacities such as agenda-setting, audience orientation, transparency, editorial independence, and collaboration among journalists, scientists, and environmental stakeholders. These capacities support continuous, context-sensitive, and solution-oriented environmental journalism. The study contributes to environmental communication scholarship by integrating perspectives on environmental communication, mediatization, and hybrid media systems into a unified framework in a West Asian context and offers practical insights for strengthening environmental journalism and long-term environmental governance in an ecologically vulnerable and politically constrained environment.