bdnews24.com set to celebrate ‘terrific 10’ years of trendsetting journalism in Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s top newsmakers will join its premier news provider to celebrate ten years of trailblazing journalism by bdnews24.com.

In attendance on Sunday will be the policy-makers of the government and political parties, top judges and lawyers; businesspersons, industrialists and entrepreneurs; poets, writers and journalists, cultural activists, sport personalities and organisers; civil and military officers and those who have witnessed turning points in the nation’s history.    

The anniversary celebrations will begin at the ballroom of Dhaka’s Radisson hotel at 8pm.

Editor-in-Chief Toufique Imrose Khalidi will take his audience through the decade-long, fascinating journey of trendsetting journalism. The event will be telecast live and end with a dinner.

A decade of innovative journalism

It all began in 2005 as 'BDNEWS', which, then, was just like other agencies operating in Bangladesh, providing news for media outlets. The only difference was that it broke away from the use of traditional teleprinters and braced the internet to cater news to its clients.

In 2006, the ownership and the management changed. Journalist Khalidi took over as Managing Director of the company and it re-emerged as 'bdnews24.com,' Bangladesh’s first dotcom company.

A bdnews24.com spokesperson said in October the same year, when Bangladesh was experiencing one of the most severe political instabilities in its history punctuated by widespread violence on the streets and when the country was on the cusp of a military regime in the guise of a caretaker administration, bdnews24.com decided to open all its content to the public.

And so, on Oct 23, 2006, Bangladesh's first internet newspaper, bdnews24.com, began an exhilarating journey. Over the next ten years, bdnews24.com, which offers free-to-access 24/7 news in Bangla and English, introduced new news contents for its readers.

It added customised portals on different topics to feed the readers' preferences and widen its digital footprints.

With around 100 million page views and 10 million unique visitors per month, bdnews24.com is now the largest news outlet in Bangladesh and considered as the most credible source for news.

A unique visit is counted every time a website is accessed from a browser and can be compared with the number of readers in case of print newspapers, said a bdnews24.com spokesperson.

Each visitor to the site is only counted once, so if the same IP address accesses the site many times, it still only counts as one visitor.

"Which means, if bdnews24.com was a printed newspaper, its readers would stand at 10 million, which is many folds higher than the total readers of all the newspapers published from Bangladesh," said the spokesperson.

bdnews24.com's hits crossed over 1.73 million when the deadliest terror attack in Bangladesh’s history unfolded on the night of Jul 1 at the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka's Gulshan.

bdnews24.com has a bold presence on the social media platforms. In 2011, when it was celebrating the fifth anniversary, its Facebook page fan was 76,257, but five years on, it has now swelled to over 7.2 million.

In keeping with the times, bdnews24.com has included multimedia content in its expanding fleet of news content along with news alert service, breaking news in English and Bangla on mobile phones – which bdnews24.com has pioneered in Bangladesh.