About AzerNews

AzerNews

Overview

AzerNews is an English-language weekly newspaper published in Baku, Azerbaijan. It was founded in 1997, and it is described by East View Information Services, which distributes it to libraries, as Azerbaijan's first English-language newspaper. That distinction is the centre of its identity. At a time when most Azerbaijani newspapers addressed domestic readers in Azerbaijani or Russian, AzerNews was created to carry news about Azerbaijan to readers who worked in English: businesspeople, diplomats, staff of international organisations and expatriates living in the country, as well as visitors and readers abroad who wanted an Azerbaijani source in a language they could read directly.

The newspaper's official website is azernews.az. In print it is a weekly, listed in reference listings of Azerbaijani newspapers as a Sunday publication in Berliner format, a page size between broadsheet and tabloid that is common among European newspapers. Online, however, its work is continuous rather than weekly: the website publishes news throughout the day on Azerbaijan, the wider region and the world. AzerNews therefore exists in two forms at once, as a weekly printed newspaper with a defined place in Azerbaijan's print market and as a daily-updated English-language news site carrying the same name and editorial mission.

History and founding

AzerNews was founded in 1997 by Fazil Abbasov, a writer and publicist with a background in Oriental studies. In an interview with The Business Year, Abbasov recalled that he had studied at Baku State University's Oriental Studies faculty, spent a year at the University of Algeria, worked as an interpreter in Syria and, after returning to Baku in 1975, worked at a satirical publication for fifteen years. In 1991, the year Azerbaijan restored its independence from the Soviet Union, he and his colleagues established AssA-Irada, which he described as the first independent news agency in Azerbaijan. Six years later, in his words, they set up the first English-language newspaper, AzerNews, and he has run both publications since.

The timing mattered. The mid-1990s were the years when foreign energy companies and other international firms were arriving in Azerbaijan in significant numbers, following the country's opening to foreign investment in its Caspian oil and gas sector. Those arrivals created a resident readership that needed Azerbaijani news in English and had few local sources for it. Speaking at the newspaper's fifteenth anniversary in 2012, Abbasov said AzerNews had been founded at a time when a number of foreign companies had come to Azerbaijan, and he stressed that the newspaper had never fallen under their influence. He also noted that a number of other English-language newspapers began to be published in Azerbaijan after AzerNews but closed shortly afterwards, while AzerNews continued.

Founder and leadership

Fazil Abbasov is consistently identified in the sources as the founder of AzerNews. The Press Council of Azerbaijan marked the newspaper's fifteenth anniversary in September 2012 with a roundtable at which its chairman, Aflatun Amashov, presented the newspaper with a diploma for informing the international community about Azerbaijan and congratulated Abbasov personally. Today.Az, reporting the same event, described Abbasov as a doctor of philosophy in Arab philology, a detail that fits the Oriental studies background he described in his own interview. His stated aim for the newspaper, given at that anniversary event, was delivering truthful and unbiased news from Azerbaijan.

The editor-in-chief named in the newspaper's own reporting over many years is Sevil Mikayilova. At the 2012 anniversary she set out plans to make AzerNews an internationally popular and influential regional newspaper, to recruit young specialists mainly in politics and economics, and to have them trained in international journalism schools. She was still identified as the editor-in-chief of the Azerkhaber-AzerNews newspaper in the paper's coverage of the World News Media Congress in Zaragoza in September 2022, where she attended as part of an Azerbaijani media delegation. The newspaper's contact information has also listed a deputy editor-in-chief alongside the editor-in-chief, although readers should treat individual staff listings as liable to change over time. No complete, independently verified current masthead is published in the sources consulted for this profile, so this account names only the two figures who are documented across multiple reports.

Format, frequency and the print edition

Reference listings describe AzerNews as a weekly newspaper published on Sundays in Berliner format. That weekly rhythm distinguishes it from Baku's daily newspapers: the print edition is a digest and showcase rather than an attempt to be first with breaking news, a role that has passed to its website. Older company descriptions of the newspaper, repeated in business directories, described it in different terms, as a broadsheet with a print run of 6,000 copies published on Wednesdays. Those descriptions date from an earlier period of the paper's life and conflict with the later Sunday and Berliner listing, so they should be read as a record of how the edition was presented at that time rather than as a description of the present print schedule.

The 6,000-copy figure also appears in Abbasov's own interview with The Business Year, given around the newspaper's fifteenth year, when he said, we publish 6,000 copies every week, and spoke of the growing number of expatriates and of local people learning English as reasons to think about increasing circulation. At the fifteenth anniversary, Mikayilova said the printed version had been renewed and its circulation increased, and that a commercial department had been established. No independently audited, up-to-date circulation figure for AzerNews was found in the sources consulted, and this profile therefore does not present the historic 6,000 figure as a current number. What can be said with confidence is that the print edition has remained part of the operation alongside the website, with the paper periodically announcing the release of another print issue.

Content and coverage

AzerNews covers the full range of a general news operation, organised on its website under headings that include nation, business and energy, alongside politics, region, culture, society and sport. Its own site description summarises its offer as news from Azerbaijan, business, energy and analysis. Energy is a natural emphasis: oil and gas are central to Azerbaijan's economy, and the business readers AzerNews was founded to serve have a direct interest in production, pipelines, prices and investment. The paper's print issues announced over the years illustrate the mix, combining stories on the state oil company SOCAR and the Shah Deniz gas project with items on tourism, film festivals, cycling, music festivals and social questions.

Alongside straight news, AzerNews publishes analysis and opinion, including commentary on Azerbaijan's foreign relations, the South Caucasus and relations with Armenia, and in 2022 it launched a project marking thirty years of Azerbaijan's diplomatic relations with individual states and organisations, presenting the material in question-and-answer form. Abbasov himself identified the then Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, European integration and relations with neighbours, Turkey in particular, as the topics that would dominate the media agenda. The newspaper's coverage is written entirely in English, which shapes its style: stories routinely explain Azerbaijani institutions, places and officials for readers who are assumed to be outside the country's Azerbaijani-language public sphere.

Audience and readership

The intended audience has been described consistently since the founding. East View and the seed listings describe a readership of business, diplomatic and expatriate readers, and Abbasov told Today.Az's audience at the anniversary that AzerNews is read by tourists, businessmen and diplomats not only in Azerbaijan but also abroad. In his Business Year interview he added that the employees of all embassies, international organisations and foreign companies operating in Baku were among its readers, and that the newspaper was available on flights of AZAL, Azerbaijan's state airline. Older company descriptions named subscribers and business partners that included major energy and service companies active in Azerbaijan and many embassies accredited in the country, which underlines how institutional, rather than purely retail, its print distribution was.

That audience explains the newspaper's durability. English-language publishing in Baku is a small market, and several later English-language titles closed, as Abbasov noted. A weekly serving embassies, companies and hotels could sustain itself on subscriptions and advertising in a way that a general English-language daily aimed at casual buyers probably could not. At the same time, the website has widened the potential audience far beyond Baku's expatriate community, to anyone searching in English for news about Azerbaijan, including researchers, journalists at foreign outlets and members of the Azerbaijani diaspora. No verified audience or traffic figures are published in the sources consulted, so the scale of that online readership cannot be stated precisely.

Digital presence

The newspaper's digital home is azernews.az, which publishes new stories throughout the day, with photographs and video, in a format closer to a news agency feed than to a weekly newspaper. At the fifteenth anniversary in 2012 the paper was already presenting its electronic version as updated in line with international practices, and it announced an iPad version for English-speaking readers and a presence in the media section of the Android platform, which it described at the time as a first for an Azerbaijani newspaper. A partnership described in older company material allowed readers anywhere to obtain the print edition in PDF form through NewspaperDirect, a service Abbasov also mentioned, saying AzerNews was the only newspaper in the country placed into PDF format worldwide through that platform.

The site also invites readers to subscribe for full digital access and promotes its social media accounts, including its presence as AzerNewsAz on what was then Twitter and as AzerNewsNewspaper on Facebook. Print-issue announcements published as recently as 2024 show the two tracks running in parallel: an online newspaper that never stops, and a periodic print edition released under the same masthead. For most international readers today, the website is AzerNews; the print weekly is the original form from which the brand grew.

Editorial stance and place in Azerbaijani media

Reference listings of Azerbaijani newspapers have classified AzerNews as centre-right and recorded support for the New Azerbaijan Party in the 2013 presidential election, while third-party media directories have applied their own, more critical labels to its output. Abbasov, by contrast, has consistently presented the newspaper as independent. He told The Business Year that AzerNews is the first independent English-language newspaper in Azerbaijan, that maintaining independence was the most important thing for the paper, and that it had no income except sales and advertising. Readers should hold those descriptions together: the paper's founder asserts an independent, commercially funded model, while outside listings place its politics on the pro-government, centre-right side of Azerbaijan's media spectrum. Both points are part of the verified record, and neither on its own is a complete description.

Within Azerbaijan's media landscape, AzerNews occupies a niche no Azerbaijani-language title can fill. It is the country's English-language window: the source a foreign embassy, investor or visiting journalist in Baku can read without translation. The Press Council chairman's anniversary remarks captured that role when he said the paper plays a tremendous role in delivering news about the country to the world community. Jahangir Mammadli, a Baku State University professor speaking at the same event, noted that publishing in a foreign language is not an easy task and described the paper as an authoritative newspaper whose format was in line with British press standards, praise that reflects the prestige attached in Baku to sustaining an English-language title.

Recognition and affiliations

AzerNews is an associate member of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, WAN-IFRA, a fact stated in its own print-issue announcements over many years, and its site records the claim that it became the first Azerbaijani newspaper to join that world association. At the fifteenth anniversary, Mikayilova also said negotiations on joining an international press association had been finalised and that AzerNews would be the first newspaper from Azerbaijan to enter it. Its editors have taken part in the World News Media Congress, WAN-IFRA's annual gathering: in 2015 Mikayilova and the head of Trend news agency discussed information exchange and content syndication with representatives of The New York Times on the congress margins, and in 2022 she attended the congress in Zaragoza.

The newspaper's own about pages also record that AzerNews was named Company of the Year in a national award, in the print media category in the account carried by another outlet, an award scheme first held in 2006 to honour companies contributing to a positive image of Azerbaijani business. The Press Council diploma presented in 2012 is a further piece of domestic recognition. These honours are largely national and industry-based rather than international journalism prizes, and no major international reporting awards for AzerNews were found in the sources consulted. Its recognition rests instead on longevity, on being first in its language category, and on membership of the world newspaper association.

At a glance

AzerNews is an English-language weekly newspaper based in Baku, Azerbaijan, founded in 1997 by Fazil Abbasov and recognised as Azerbaijan's first English-language newspaper. It is listed as a Sunday publication in Berliner format, serves business, diplomatic and expatriate readers in print, and publishes continuously in English on its official website, azernews.az, covering Azerbaijani politics, business and energy, regional affairs, culture and sport. Its documented editor-in-chief is Sevil Mikayilova, and it is an associate member of WAN-IFRA. The public record on the newspaper is thinner in some areas than its long life might suggest: no current audited circulation, revenue or full staff list is available in the sources consulted, and older descriptions of its format, publication day and print run differ from later listings. Those limits are stated openly here rather than filled in, but they do not obscure the central fact of the profile, that AzerNews created English-language newspaper publishing in Azerbaijan in 1997 and has sustained it, in print and online, ever since.