bdnews24.com is an English and
Bengali language
Bengali ( ), generally known by its endonym Bangla (, ), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken ...
news website of
Bangladesh
Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mo ...
.
History
In 2005, the company launched initially as the country's first exclusively web-based
news agency
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswir ...
, and was known as BDNEWS. The website bdnews24.com developed by Ahmed Yasir Riad (2005-2013) was Bangladesh's first 24/7 bilingual news web portal. The other two national news agencies at the time were the state-owned
Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha
Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) is Bangladesh's national news agency and was established on January 1, 1972, by government order soon after its independence from Pakistan. Abul Kalam Azad
Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddi ...
(BSS) and the privately owned
United News of Bangladesh
United News of Bangladesh (UNB) is a Bangladesh private sector news agency established in 1988. Enayetullah Khan established UNB in the 1980s. It is the first fully digitized private wire service in South Asia.
UNB has news exchange agreements w ...
(UNB), which at the time were
teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...
-based "wire services". Following a take-over in mid-2006 at the agency's
holding company
A holding company is a company whose primary business is holding a controlling interest in the securities of other companies. A holding company usually does not produce goods or services itself. Its purpose is to own shares of other companies ...
Bangladesh News 24 Hours Ltd, ownership is vested between two sole board directors: Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief Toufique Imrose Khalidi, and Chair of the company Asif Mahmood.
In October 2006, bdnews24.com relaunched as Bangladesh's first free online newspaper developed by Yasir, and was rebranded as bdnews24.com. Editor-in-Chief Khalidi is a
journalist
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...
and former
BBC broadcaster. On 28 May 2012 the office of bdnews24.com was attacked by men with machetes injuring three journalists.
Website block
In June 2018, Bdnews24.com was blocked without explanation by the
(BTRC). After several hours, the BTRC unblocked the website. According to the chairman of the BTRC, the site had "added some objectionable comments in one of their news items". The item was not identified by the BTRC, but other sources reported that it was about General
Aziz Ahmed's appointment as army chief of staff.
References
External links
* (EN)
* (BN)
{{Newspapers of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Journal=
2005 establishments in Bangladesh
Bangladeshi news websites