About Today.az

Today.az

Today.az is an English-language news portal based in Baku, Azerbaijan, run by the Day.az media company. It presents Azerbaijani politics, business, energy and society news to an international readership, translating the work of one of Azerbaijan's oldest online media groups into the language most accessible to readers outside the country. Where its sister portals address domestic audiences in Russian and Azerbaijani, Today.az addresses diplomats, investors, researchers, journalists and members of the Azerbaijani diaspora who follow the country in English. In 2012 the portal received Azerbaijan's national UGUR, or Success, award for informing the world community about developments in Azerbaijan, a citation that captures its intended function precisely: it exists to explain Azerbaijan to the world, in the world's main lingua franca, from Baku.

The Day.az media company and its three languages

Today.az cannot be understood separately from Day.az, the media company that runs it. Day.az is an Azerbaijani news portal established in 2003 by Anar Mammadkhanov, a member of parliament, trading as the Day.Az Media Company. From its base in Baku the company developed a three-language structure that became one of the defining models of Azerbaijani online media. Content is published in Russian on day.az, in English on today.az, and in Azerbaijani on milli.az, which has operated since 1 February 2010. Each edition addresses a distinct readership: Russian remains widely read in Baku and across the post-Soviet region, Azerbaijani is the state language and the language of the domestic majority, and English reaches the international audience that has no access to either.

That structure reflects Azerbaijan's linguistic position. The country sits between Russian-speaking post-Soviet space, the Turkic world and the energy and diplomatic markets of Europe and the United States. A Baku media company that publishes in all three languages can follow a single news agenda across all of those audiences at once. Today.az is the outward-facing part of that system. Its politics, business, energy and society coverage takes stories that originate in Azerbaijani public life and presents them in a form that foreign newsrooms, embassies and businesses can use directly, which is why English-language Azerbaijani portals are routinely cited by international researchers monitoring the South Caucasus.

Energy, business and the international reader

The subject mix recorded for Today.az, politics, business, energy and society, is not accidental. Azerbaijan is a major oil and gas producer on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the starting point of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and of the Southern Gas Corridor that carries Azerbaijani gas through Georgia and Turkey to Europe. Energy decisions taken in Baku affect European energy security, and they are followed closely by governments, markets and specialist press abroad. An English-language portal in Baku therefore has a natural international readership for energy news that a purely domestic outlet does not, and business coverage follows from the same interest, since foreign companies, investors and development institutions all monitor Azerbaijan's economy in English.

Politics and society complete the picture. Azerbaijan's relations with Armenia, including the long Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its aftermath, its relations with Russia, Turkey, Iran and the European Union, and its domestic political development are all subjects of sustained international attention. Today.az serves readers who need that news in English and who, in many cases, have no alternative Baku-based English source publishing at daily volume. The portal's stated achievement in the UGUR citation, informing the world community of the facts and developments ongoing in Azerbaijan, describes exactly this bridging role between a domestic newsroom and an external audience.

The UGUR award of 2012

The best-documented honour in Today.az's history is the annual UGUR award it received in 2012. UGUR, meaning Success, was founded by Consulting and Business magazine in 2000 and is described as the first economic and business award in Azerbaijan, conferred on businesspeople, statesmen and public figures for contributions to the development of the national economy, the creation of jobs and the improvement of welfare. In 2012 the winners numbered 30 companies and brands operating in Azerbaijan and abroad, and Today.az was recognised, in the words of the contemporary AzerNews report, as instrumental in informing the world community of the facts and developments ongoing in Azerbaijan. The award was presented at a ceremony held at the Jumeirah Bilgah Beach Hotel in Baku on 24 April 2012.

The award matters for a directory profile because it is independent contemporary evidence of the portal's standing at that date, recorded outside the company itself. It also places Today.az inside a wider pattern of recognition for its parent group: the Day.az media company itself later received the UGUR prize in the Media Partner of the Year category in December 2016, and staff of the Day.az and Milli.az portals were among the media professionals awarded the 150th Anniversary of Azerbaijani National Press jubilee medal in 2025, established by presidential decree to mark a century and a half since the first Azerbaijani newspaper. Recognition of this kind, from national business and state institutions, shows a portal group that is established and officially regarded within Azerbaijan, while publishing for readers far beyond it.

Disruption, closure and relaunch in 2009

The most turbulent episode in the group's history came in 2009 and affected Today.az directly. On 18 February 2009 the Day.az portal became inaccessible, and on the following day the day.az and today.az domains were removed from the .az top-level domain. Contemporary and later accounts of the cause varied widely, ranging from speculation about political mistakes and hacking to the creation of a new website. The episode is recorded in the portal's reference history as connected to the publication of an interview with Boris Berezovsky, the Russian businessman then in exile in the United Kingdom, which reportedly angered the Russian leadership and triggered pressure for the site to be shut off. The portal was subsequently reopened under Trend News Agency management, described in that history as loyal to the existing government.

Earlier disruption had also been reported. The operators of Day.az said they were victims of cyberattacks during the 2008 South Ossetia war, and on 11 August 2009 Day.az and ANS Press were disrupted, with day.az inaccessible for almost two hours. For a directory profile, the significance of the 2009 sequence is twofold. It demonstrates that Today.az, although published in English for foreigners, has always been subject to the same domestic pressures as any Baku outlet, including control of the national domain. It also marks the point after which the portal operated under new management aligned with the authorities, a fact readers should hold in mind when assessing the editorial position of its English-language output.

Editorial position and how to read it

Today.az presents Azerbaijani news from Baku, and its perspective is that of an established, officially recognised Azerbaijani media group rather than an independent or opposition outlet. That positioning is visible in its award history, in the state honours received by staff of its sister portals, and in the circumstances of its 2009 relaunch. For the international readers who are its audience, this has a practical implication: Today.az is a valuable primary window onto how Azerbaijan wishes its politics, energy sector and society to be understood abroad, and its coverage is often the fastest English-language account of official announcements and domestic developments. At the same time, researchers who use it for contested subjects, above all relations with Armenia and domestic politics, routinely read it alongside international and independent sources, as they would any nationally aligned outlet in the region.

That balanced assessment is not a criticism unique to Today.az. External media guides describe most large Baku-based portals in similar terms, because Azerbaijan's media economy, including state support administered by the Media Development Agency and the registration system under the 2022 Law on Media, structurally favours outlets aligned with the state. An English-language service does not stand outside that system simply because its readers are abroad. What distinguishes Today.az is not independence but reach and longevity: few Azerbaijani outlets have published continuously in English, from Baku, for as long as the Day.az group's English edition has.

Place in Azerbaijan's English-language media

Azerbaijan's English-language media field is small compared with its Azerbaijani and Russian fields. It includes the English service of the state news agency AZERTAC, the AzerNews newspaper and website, the English output of Trend News Agency and a handful of portals. Within that field, Today.az occupies the position of a general portal rather than a wire or a newspaper: it aggregates politics, business, energy, culture and society news in a continuous online format inherited from the Day.az model. Media monitoring projects and academic studies of Azerbaijani online media have long treated the Day.az group as one of the reference points of the country's internet press, with older IREX media sustainability reporting describing Day.az as among the most widely read news sources in the country because its service was free, at a time when agencies such as Turan and Trend were subscription-based.

The group's longevity underpins that status. A portal family founded in 2003 predates most of Azerbaijan's current online media and survived the domain removal of 2009, the contraction of print, the arrival of the Media Registry in 2022 and the wider tightening of media law in the 2020s. Today.az's continued publication in English is part of that survival story: the English edition has been maintained through each change of management and regulation, which suggests the outward-facing function it performs has remained valued by each successive owner and by the state institutions that have honoured the group.

What is not publicly verified

As with many Azerbaijani outlets, some details of Today.az are not independently verifiable and are not asserted here. Separate staffing, traffic and budget figures for the English edition alone are not published; recognition and honours are generally recorded for the Day.az media company or its portals collectively rather than for Today.az in isolation, apart from the specific 2012 UGUR award to Today.az itself. The full internal history of the 2009 domain removal also remains contested in public accounts, which offer differing explanations, and this profile reports the range of those accounts rather than selecting one as proven. Ownership records for Azerbaijani media companies are not publicly accessible, a general limitation noted by investigative organisations, so no ultimate ownership claim beyond the documented founding of Day.az in 2003 and its subsequent management by Trend is made here.

Today.az today

Today.az remains active as the English-language portal of the Baku-based Day.az media company, publishing Azerbaijani politics, business, energy and society news for an international readership alongside its Russian-language and Azerbaijani-language sister editions. Its defining documented facts are its place inside one of Azerbaijan's oldest online media groups, founded in 2003, its survival of the 2009 removal of the today.az domain and subsequent relaunch, and its 2012 UGUR award for informing the world community about developments in Azerbaijan. For anyone mapping media in the South Caucasus, it is a necessary entry: the standing English-language window through which an established Baku newsroom presents the country to readers who do not read Azerbaijani or Russian.