About AZERTAC

AZERTAC

AZERTAC is the official state news agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Its full name in Azerbaijani is Azərbaycan Dövlət İnformasiya Agentliyi, and the short form AZERTAC derives from Azərbaycan Teleqraf Agentliyi, meaning Telegraph Agency of Azerbaijan. Headquartered in Baku, the capital, it operates as a wire service owned by the Government of Azerbaijan, distributing official state news alongside general reporting on national and international affairs. Its official website is azertag.az.

With a history stretching back to 1 March 1920, AZERTAC is described in anniversary accounts as the country's first national news agency. That longevity, spanning the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, seven decades under Soviet rule, and the restored independent republic after 1991, is central to how the agency presents itself: as a chronicler of Azerbaijani statehood as well as a present-day news provider. Today it publishes in eight languages, maintains correspondents in 24 countries, and holds memberships and leadership roles in international associations of news agencies.

Overview and Identity

AZERTAC functions first as the channel through which the Azerbaijani state communicates official information. Alongside that official material, it releases news on politics, economy, education, science, culture, health, sports and the environment. The product, in the terms used in reference listings, is a wire service: a continuous flow of news reports, photographs and video intended both for direct publication on its own website and for use by other media organisations in Azerbaijan and abroad.

The agency's legal identity has evolved with its name. A public-law entity bearing the name Azerbaijan State Information Agency was created on 24 November 2016, and its governing charter was approved on 19 December 2017. That charter, as summarised by the State Media Monitor project, requires AZERTAC to disseminate official material from the President, the National Assembly (parliament) and the Cabinet of Ministers, while also describing the agency as independent in its activities and requiring objective and comprehensive coverage. Readers should understand both parts of that mandate together: AZERTAC is, by design, part of the state's official communication system, not a privately owned or independent news agency.

Founding in 1920 and the Democratic Republic Period

AZERTAC was founded on 1 March 1920 by the government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Anniversary histories published by and about the agency give a fuller account of the steps leading to that date. The idea of an Azerbaijan Telegraph Agency was discussed at a session of the Council of Ministers on 3 March 1919, at which the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Fatali Khan Khoyski, was heard and the task of establishing the agency was initially entrusted to the Minister of Enlightenment, Nasib Bey Usubbayov. Responsibility later passed to the Ministry of Posts and Telegraph, and a draft law and statute for the agency were drawn up in the second half of 1919.

On 2 February 1920, a draft staff plan and statute were discussed at a government session and then submitted to parliament. At parliament's session on 23 February, members Agha Eminov and Agha Ashurov argued for the necessity of establishing the agency. The agency was then founded on 1 March 1920, and it published its first news on 2 March 1920, under the AzerTac signature in the newspaper Azerbaijan.

That first independent chapter was brief. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic lost its independence on 28 April 1920, only 58 days after the agency's founding. AZERTAC histories describe those 58 days as the whole of its period as an independent news source for the republic, after which it continued in a very different form within the Soviet system.

The Soviet Period and Changing Names

Following the collapse of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the agency operated as a branch of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, commonly known as TASS in English-language sources and rendered as SITA in some AZERTAC anniversary accounts. Over roughly 70 years of Soviet rule, its name was changed seven times, and its work was subject to the restrictions and censorship of that period. One of its Soviet-era names, recorded in media histories, was Azerinform, following an initial form as the Azerbaijan Telegraph Agency.

Despite those constraints, the agency continued operating and developing its technical base. AZERTAC's own anniversary history notes that in 1932 the agency installed its first teletypewriter, a Kleinschmidt typewriter imported from abroad, at a time when its technical base was otherwise minimal. The same history describes the 1970s, when the Soviet agency's head office in Moscow began computerising, as a period in which Azerinform received modern Videoton and Olivetti computers. Reporting on the agency's later headquarters also notes that, in the Soviet period, AZERTAC was among the agencies best equipped to transmit official documents directly over long distances. A complete, year-by-year list of all seven Soviet-era names and the dates of leadership in the earliest decades is not consistently given in the sources consulted for this profile, and no such list is invented here.

Restoration After Independence

When Azerbaijan restored its independence in 1991, AZERTAC reclaimed its historical name. The post-independence renaming sequence is documented in reference and institutional sources. From 3 March 1995, it became the State Telegraph Agency under the Cabinet of Ministers, a step also described as granting it the status of a state information body. On 17 January 2000, it was renamed the Azerbaijan State Telegraph Agency.

The most recent renaming came on 26 February 2015, when President Ilham Aliyev signed an order renaming the Azerbaijan State Telegraph Agency to the Azerbaijan State Information Agency, retaining the AZERTAC short form. The creation of the agency as a public-law entity in November 2016 and the approval of its charter in December 2017 followed that renaming, giving the modern agency its current legal form.

Anniversary accounts stress what changed in practical terms after 1991: the agency formed a world news network, appointed representatives in foreign countries, and began both following the world agenda and conveying developments in Azerbaijan to audiences abroad. That outward-facing role, rather than purely domestic official reporting, has remained a defining part of its work since.

Legal Status, Governance and Leadership

AZERTAC is governed by a five-member Management Board, under arrangements prescribed by its 2017 charter. Board members serve five-year terms. The President of Azerbaijan appoints and dismisses the chairman and two deputy chairmen; the Cabinet of Ministers, acting in agreement with the President, appoints and dismisses the other two members. Beyond appointments, the President exercises institutional supervision over the agency, receives its annual report, and must agree its structure, staffing level and expenditure estimate. The President also holds the power to reorganise or dissolve the agency. This degree of presidential control is the factual basis on which external monitors, including the State Media Monitor, classify AZERTAC as state-controlled media.

The current chairman is Vugar Aliyev, appointed Chairman of the Board by President Ilham Aliyev on 28 November 2022. He succeeded Aslan Aslanov, who had led the agency from 30 October 2002 to 19 November 2022. According to a biographical dossier published by Azernews at the time of the appointment, Vugar Aliyev was born in 1980 in Baku, graduated from the Azerbaijan University of Languages and then from Moscow State Linguistic University with a degree in journalism, worked initially as a translator in AZERTAC's English department and later as a responsible employee of its policy department, and held a responsible position in the Presidential Administration immediately before his appointment.

Funding is principally from the state budget. The State Media Monitor, citing the official implementation annex for Azerbaijan's 2026 state budget, records an allocation of 7,156,175 Azerbaijani manat to the agency. The charter also permits income from grants, donations, contracts, services and sales, so state financing is not necessarily exclusive; however, the proportion of revenue from each source could not be verified from published financial statements for this profile, and that limit is stated openly rather than estimated.

News Coverage and Languages

AZERTAC publishes news in eight languages: Azerbaijani, Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. That multilingual output is unusual in scale for a country of Azerbaijan's size and reflects the agency's stated task of conveying Azerbaijani realities to the world, as well as reporting world events back to Azerbaijani audiences.

Subject coverage is broad. In addition to official state news, the agency covers socio-political and economic affairs, science, education, culture, healthcare, sport, the environment and other fields. It also produces video news in five languages, which agency accounts describe as a first for a news agency in the region, alongside its photographic service. Distribution is through the azertag.az website, news bulletins supplied to subscribers and partner media, and social media: agency accounts put the number of social media pages, across languages and profiles, at around 30.

Correspondent Network and International Cooperation

AZERTAC's reporting reach rests on its own correspondents and on exchange agreements with other agencies. A July 2025 agency report recorded 25 correspondent posts in 24 countries, a figure also cited by the chairman in remarks about the agency's global network. Earlier agency accounts gave lower figures, such as bureaus or representative offices in 21 countries, reflecting the network at those earlier dates; the 24-country figure is the most recent verified in the sources consulted.

Cooperation agreements extend much wider than the correspondent network. AZERTAC's institutional page states that it has cooperation agreements with news agencies in more than fifty countries, and agency anniversary accounts put the number at about 50 foreign news agencies, with information exchange conducted with about 150 agencies across five continents. Named partners in those accounts include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Press Association and DPA. Specific bilateral steps documented in reference sources include a memorandum of understanding with the Polish Press Agency on 26 April 2012, a memorandum with Israel's Tazpit Press Service in September 2019, and a memorandum with Cuba's Prensa Latina on 26 October 2019.

International Memberships and Presidencies

AZERTAC is a member of the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) and the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), and agency sources list it as a member of seven regional and international media organisations in total, including bodies for Black Sea, CIS, Turkic-speaking and Islamic news agencies. It chaired the Black Sea Association of National News Agencies in 2011 to 2013.

Its most prominent international roles came in the following decade. Baku hosted the 5th News Agencies World Congress, the 16th General Assembly of OANA and the 22nd session of the Council of CIS Heads of News Agencies on 16 to 18 November 2016, co-organised by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and AZERTAC and bringing together representatives of more than 100 news agencies. At those gatherings AZERTAC assumed a three-year presidency, for 2016 to 2019, of both the News Agencies World Congress and OANA. More recently, at the founding general assembly of the Alliance of Turkic News Agencies (ATNA) in Istanbul, AZERTAC was elected Secretary-General of that alliance. The exact founding year of ATNA is given in agency accounts only relative to their publication dates, so it is not restated here as a fixed year.

Output, Digital Services and the New Headquarters

The scale of production reported by the agency has grown with its digital services. Agency accounts state that in 2023 alone AZERTAC prepared more than 190,000 information items, and that in 2024 it produced over 330,000 pieces of information, including news articles, photographs and video news segments. Daily averages cited in a 2024 account were more than 500 news items, more than 40 videos and more than 100 photographs posted on the site each day. These figures are the agency's own reported output and have not been independently audited in the sources consulted; they are presented on that basis.

The agency now works from a new headquarters building in Baku, constructed under a presidential order at 70 Ataturk Avenue. President Ilham Aliyev viewed the completed building on 27 December 2021, when he was briefed by the then chairman, Aslan Aslanov. The building has nine floors and a basement car park, was built to modern standards including resistance to magnitude-eight earthquakes, and contains newsrooms and multimedia studios, a conference room equipped for simultaneous interpretation, a library, and a museum displaying technical equipment AZERTAC has used at different times. On its first floor are photo stands documenting media events involving the national leadership. Agency histories marking its 104th anniversary in 2024 described staff working in this new building with modern information technologies, following a redesign of the agency's logo and website the previous year.

Role in Azerbaijan's Media Landscape and Limits of the Record

Within Azerbaijan, AZERTAC occupies a position no private outlet can replicate: it is the authoritative source for the text of official decisions, presidential orders, parliamentary and government statements, and state visits, and other Azerbaijani media routinely reproduce its reporting. Internationally, its eight-language wire and its presidencies of agency associations have made it the most visible Azerbaijani news organisation abroad, a role underlined when it marked its 105th anniversary on 1 March 2025.

A balanced profile must also record how the agency is assessed externally. The State Media Monitor classifies AZERTAC as state-controlled, citing presidential appointment of its board, direct state-budget funding, supervision by the President, and a charter duty to disseminate official material and organise services in accordance with state policy, and noting interviews in March 2024 in which journalists described its output as aligned with official positions. AZERTAC's own charter, by contrast, describes the agency as independent in its activities and requires objective and comprehensive coverage, and Azerbaijan's Law on Media declares the media free and prohibits censorship. Both the formal safeguards and the structural controls are documented; readers can weigh them for themselves.

Finally, the limits of the verified record should be clear. Staff numbers for the agency as a whole, a breakdown of its revenue beyond the state-budget allocation, a complete list of its Soviet-era names and early directors with no gaps, and independently audited circulation or audience figures were not established from reliable sources during research for this profile. Where this article gives figures for output, correspondents and partner agencies, they are the figures reported by AZERTAC itself or by the monitors cited, attributed as such, rather than independently confirmed measurements.