About Day.az

Day.az

Day.az is one of Azerbaijan's pioneering news portals, established in 2003 in Baku and trading as the Day.Az Media Company. Founded by Anar Mammadkhanov, a member of Azerbaijan's parliament, it is widely described as Azerbaijan's first news portal, and for much of the 2000s it was the country's dominant Russian-language news site. Its content has been published across a small family of domains: in Russian at day.az, in English as Today.az, and in Azerbaijani as Milli.az since 1 February 2010. It remains active and is still routinely listed among Azerbaijan's leading news websites.

Founding and Anar Mammadkhanov

Day.az was established in 2003 by Anar Jamal oglu Mammadkhanov (20 July 1970 - 23 April 2011), who served as a member of the National Assembly of Azerbaijan for the Surakhani constituency from 1995. Before and alongside his parliamentary career, Mammadkhanov was nationally famous as captain of the Parni iz Baku (Guys from Baku) team in the KVN comedy competition, a background that made him one of Azerbaijan's most recognisable public figures. Azerbaijani and international obituaries praised him for creating Day.az as Azerbaijan's first news portal. He graduated from Baku State University in 1991 and died in Baku on 23 April 2011 of a sudden heart attack, aged 40.

The founding date matters for media history. In 2003, Azerbaijani online news was in its infancy, print newspapers and television dominated, and a continuously updated portal was a novelty. Day.az's early mover advantage, Russian-language focus and political connections made it, in IREX's assessment, a standout commercial success: IREX's Media Sustainability Index reporting described Day.az as a widely read site considered a reliable source of information whose Russian-language advertising was sold six months in advance, and which outpaced television news by updating stories flexibly as they developed.

The Day.az family of sites

From the start, Day.az was conceived as more than a single-language site. The main portal at day.az publishes in Russian, serving Azerbaijan's large Russian-speaking readership and the wider post-Soviet audience. The English-language service, Today.az, presented Azerbaijani news to international readers under the slogan of covering Azerbaijan inside and outside. On 1 February 2010 the family was completed by Milli.az, the Azerbaijani-language edition, whose launch gave the group a full presence in the country's state language. Reference sources differ slightly in how they summarise this structure, some listing Day.az itself as available in Azerbaijani and Russian, but the underlying three-domain model of Day.az, Today.az and Milli.az is consistently documented.

Content and readership

Day.az publishes general news: Azerbaijani politics and society, regional developments in the South Caucasus, Russian and world news, business, culture, sport and entertainment. Academic research on Azerbaijani online media has used Day.az as a primary case study, noting that it was one of the biggest online news resources in the country with the largest Russian-language audience, a position that made its framing of sensitive topics, such as the Armenian diaspora in one 2013 content study, a subject of scholarly interest. The Prism UA disinformation resilience study listed Day.az among the Russian-language news sites in Azerbaijan's top 50 websites overall, describing it at that time as mainly Russian and independent, a characterisation that reflects its earlier ownership era and differs from assessments of its later position after its change of management, discussed below.

Disruptions in 2008 and 2009

Day.az's early history includes repeated disruptions that illustrate the political sensitivity of online news in the region. Its operators said the portal was the victim of cyberattacks during the August 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia. On 18 February 2009 the portal became inaccessible, and on the following day the day.az and today.az domains were removed from the .az top-level domain. Reporting on the cause ranged from speculation about political mistakes and hacking to the creation of a new website. On 11 August 2009 Day.az and ANS Press were disrupted again, with day.az inaccessible for almost two hours. IREX's contemporaneous account described the February 2009 shutdown as officially attributed to technical problems, followed within days by the announcement of the site's sale.

Sale and relaunch under Trend

The 2009 shutdown was followed by a change of ownership and management. Wikipedia's account, drawing on the reporting of the period, states that the sale process was triggered by Day.az's publication of an interview with Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian businessman, which angered Russia's president at the time, Vladimir Putin, who demanded the site be shut off; the website was later reopened under the management of Trend News Agency, described as loyal to the existing government. IREX's Media Sustainability Index likewise recorded that several days after the February 2009 shutdown, Day.az's sale to pro-government businessman Ilgar Guseynov was announced. The two accounts agree on the essential sequence: interruption, sale to a government-aligned owner, and relaunch under new, loyal management. This profile presents that sequence as documented in reference and media-sustainability sources; the alleged role of the Berezovsky interview rests on those sources rather than on any statement by the portal itself.

Position in the media landscape

Day.az helped define the Azerbaijani portal model that later competitors, including Oxu.az, Qafqazinfo and Haqqin.az, would follow: Baku-based, Russian-first or bilingual, advertising-funded, and updated continuously. IREX's early assessments treated it as proof that an online outlet in Azerbaijan could succeed commercially and outrun television on breaking stories. Its listings in later studies are equally instructive: researchers continued to rank it among the country's most popular resources well into the 2010s, and general guides still describe it as a bilingual portal covering breaking news, politics and entertainment for a wide audience. Azerbaijani academic work on media monitoring lists day.az alongside lent.az, modern.az, AZERTAC, Trend and Report among the country's well-known news portals and agencies.

Languages and access

The portal's language structure is its most distinctive feature. Russian at day.az, English at today.az and Azerbaijani at milli.az since February 2010 gave one newsroom three distinct readerships: the domestic Russian-speaking audience, the domestic Azerbaijani-speaking audience, and international readers following Azerbaijan in English. For language learners and researchers, Day.az has even been recommended in study guides as a bilingual resource whose Azerbaijani and Russian articles can be compared side by side. The English service's archive shows the breadth of its early international coverage, with world, regional and Azerbaijani stories published side by side through the day.

Regulatory and market context

Day.az now operates within the framework of Azerbaijan's Law on Media, in force since February 2022, and the Media Registry administered by the Media Development Agency, which requires online media to publish at least 20 articles per day, to meet founder citizenship and residency rules and to disclose organisational information with a named person responsible for editorial content. It also operates in a market that press-freedom organisations describe as overwhelmingly government-aligned, in which Reporters Without Borders says virtually the entire media sector is under official control. Day.az's own trajectory, from an innovative, comparatively independent pioneer to a portal relaunched under government-loyal management, is frequently cited as an early example of that wider consolidation.

What is not publicly verified

Current ownership and staffing details for Day.az are not transparently published, and this profile does not name a present owner or editor beyond the documented historical record: foundation by Anar Mammadkhanov in 2003, the 2009 sale reported by IREX, and the subsequent relaunch under Trend News Agency management reported by Wikipedia. Audited traffic figures are likewise unavailable; descriptions of the portal as one of Azerbaijan's leading sites rest on IREX assessments, Alexa-based rankings in the Prism UA study and continuing listings in Azerbaijani academic and reference sources. The Berezovsky interview explanation for the 2009 sale is a reported account, flagged as such above, not a confirmed statement by any party to the sale.

Day.az today

Day.az remains active more than two decades after its 2003 launch, an unusually long life for a regional news portal and a measure of the durability of the brand Mammadkhanov created. Together with Today.az and Milli.az it continues to publish Azerbaijani, regional and world news for Russian-, English- and Azerbaijani-speaking readers. For a directory of world media it earns its place twice over: as a still-operating leading Azerbaijani news site, and as a historically significant title, Azerbaijan's first news portal, whose founding, disruptions and change of ownership trace the development of online journalism in the country from experimentation to consolidation.