The editor who reset Bangladesh’s newsroom clock
Sometime in the mid-2000s, when private television channels were multiplying in Bangladesh and the television talk show was becoming a nightly ritual, I first came across Toufique Imrose Khalidi.
I no longer remember the programme or the other guest. But I remember that Khalidi was introduced as the editor of an online newspaper called bdnews24.com. At one point, his fellow guest, live on television, asked him what exactly an online newspaper was. Khalidi explained, slightly embarrassed.
News, as I remember he said in essence, could be published on the internet, continuously, without waiting for a newspaper to be printed the next morning.
The exchange stayed with me because of how unfamiliar the proposition seemed at that time. I went online afterward and searched for bdnews24.com. My connection was through Banglalion WiMAX, itself then one of those new technologies that made the internet feel as if it had suddenly arrived in Bangladesh.
It is difficult now to reconstruct the novelty of that moment. Now, news arrives on a phone before television anchors can announce it. Newspapers publish stories throughout the day and entire reputed and venerable news organisations exist without printing a page.
Khalidi, who did as much as anyone to make that transition ordinary in Bangladesh, died in London on Friday. He was 59.
He had collapsed the previous evening while in London and was taken to a hospital. bdnews24.com colleagues told Bangladeshi media that he died while undergoing treatment after suffering a stroke or brain haemorrhage.
A doyen of the industry
Even in early 2010’s when I started my journalism career, Bangladesh's newspaper culture was still overwhelmingly organised around print. Internet remained peripheral to the daily news habits of much of the country.
Khalidi saw something else coming.
A former BBC broadcaster with experience across print, television and online journalism, he had encountered BDNEWS, then an internet-based news agency, while still working for the BBC in London. By early 2006, the company was in serious financial trouble.
Khalidi later described it as a "sinking, dying" business. He was initially approached to help find someone willing to take it over. Instead, he became part of the takeover himself, liabilities included. The new management arrived in June. By September, BDNEWS had become bdnews24.com.
The decisive moment came almost by accident.
On the evening of October 22, 2006, Bangladesh was about to enter a five-day Eid holiday during which newspapers would stop publishing. Khalidi later recalled being stuck in traffic outside the Prime Minister's Office while returning to bdnews24.com's Dhanmondi newsroom. The newsroom, unlike the newspapers, would remain open to serve its handful of media clients.
"Why, then, not serve readers directly?” He thought. At 12:01 am on October 23, the site's content went free. The subscription news service became a continuously updated online newspaper. bdnews24.com describes it as Bangladesh's first internet-only newspaper and the country's first round-the-clock digital news publisher.
It was an early bet on a habit that barely existed. "All these dot com bubbles had already burst in some of the countries in Europe," Khalidi later recalled in an interview that was published in his own portal. "In Bangladesh, it hadn't begun at all. So I thought why not give it a try."
The bet changed Bangladeshi journalism. It operated in Bangla and English, introduced mobile versions and experimented early with breaking-news SMS alerts, including Bangla alerts. It later developed children's news products, including a Bangla website run with child journalists. In 2017, Khalidi received a government ICT award for his contribution to digital news.
There is an anecdote from the early newsroom that captures his instincts particularly well.
In 2007, when bdnews24.com still operated from Dhanmondi, mobile internet was rudimentary and most journalists carried button phones. Khalidi kept telling colleagues that he wanted people to read bdnews24.com on their phones. Some laughed.
A former colleague later remembered the newsroom joke: why would anyone spend money on mobile internet just to read bdnews24.com on a telephone? Within a few years, the joke had ceased to work.
The site's influence could also be measured by what everyone else did next. Online editions became indispensable to established newspapers. Digital-only publications proliferated. Breaking news moved from tomorrow's front page to the next browser refresh and eventually to the notification screen.
Khalidi was not especially modest about his place in that transformation. "We had to lead," he said in 2021. "We led, and others followed." There was of course substance beneath the boast.
Politics and proximity
Khalidi's legacy becomes more complicated around politics.
His years at bdnews24.com overlapped substantially with Sheikh Hasina's long tenure as prime minister, a period marked by growing authoritarianism and criticism at home and abroad over restrictions on the media and pressure on dissenting journalism.
bdnews24.com was frequently perceived by critics as sympathetic to Hasina's dictatorial government. Government ministers and influential Awami League figures appeared regularly at its events, and Khalidi received his national ICT recognition during Hasina's rule.
His own relationship with the political establishment was more contradictory and nuanced. Khalidi publicly criticised political interference in journalism and the government's handling of television licences. He complained that officials attempted to dictate what news organisations could publish.
As president of the ‘controversial’ Editors Guild, Bangladesh, he called for provisions of the Digital Security Act that threatened journalism to be repealed or amended and said journalists had to resist self-censorship. His own newsroom was not spared that law.
In 2020, an Awami League-affiliated local politician brought a Digital Security Act case against Khalidi and several other journalists over reporting on the alleged misappropriation of relief rice. The International Federation of Journalists criticised the case.
It was one of the enduring ambiguities of his public career. He ran a publication that critics accused of being too comfortable with an authoritarian establishment, yet he also encountered the legal and institutional pressures that establishment could bring to bear on journalism.
Khalidi generally operated through the institution he had built, and very rarely he wrote for others. One such notable example came in May 2013.
Hefazat-e-Islam had suddenly moved from the Qawmi madrasa world into the centre of national politics. Its huge demonstrations, 13-point programme and confrontation with the government had left many outside Bangladesh struggling to understand what the organisation was and where it had come from.
Four days after its May 5 mobilisation in Dhaka, Khalidi wrote "Behind the rise of Bangladesh's Hifazat" for Al Jazeera.
He described an organisation headquartered not in Dhaka but in Chattogram, rooted in a vast network of Qawmi madrasas and led by Ahmad Shafi. Rather than treating Hefazat simply as another Islamist political party, he examined its institutional origins, its relationship with the madrasa establishment and its complicated connections with Jamaat-e-Islami.
The article also caught a more interesting political dynamic: Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, despite occupying opposite sides of an intensely polarised political system, were each trying in different ways to respond to the Islamist constituency Hefazat had demonstrated it could mobilise.
The case that followed him for years
The most serious legal battle of Khalidi's later career was not about journalism directly. It was about money.
In October 2019, LR Global Bangladesh announced a 50 crore taka investment in bdnews24.com. Regulators subsequently scrutinised the transaction.
In July 2020, the Anti-Corruption Commission filed a case accusing Khalidi of possessing 42 crore taka that investigators alleged could not be traced to legitimate sources. The ACC questioned the share transaction and the valuation attached to the company. Khalidi denied wrongdoing.
He maintained that the money came from a legitimate and publicly disclosed investment and that bdnews24.com had been independently valued at substantially more than the figure implied by investigators. He portrayed the case as retaliation by powerful interests angered by the portal's journalism.
The legal battle lasted years.
The Supreme Court's Appellate Division dismissed an ACC challenge to his bail in 2020. His bank accounts and those of bdnews24.com were frozen, and restrictions were imposed on his travel. Then, in September 2024, the prosecution collapsed.
The ACC withdrew the charges. A Dhaka court cleared Khalidi, ordered the accounts unfrozen and removed the travel restriction. Khalidi did not regard that as the end of the story.
He described the preceding five years as harassment and asked who would answer for the damage. The episode, he later said, had inflicted substantial financial harm on bdnews24.com.
The institution
bdnews24.com, in all good senses, has become an institution, and like institutions that survive long enough, it carried both achievements and baggage.
Its critics questioned its editorial choices and its relationship with dictatorial political power like Hasina. Khalidi however maintained the stance that the newsroom had resisted attempts by politicians, businessmen and government agencies to control its journalism.
In 2024, Khalidi said powerful people had sought the deletion of old stories from the site. bdnews24.com had refused. "Historical records should not be erased," he said. "As journalists, we write the first draft of history, and our archives must remain intact."
Its English edition became one of the principal ways readers outside Bangladesh could follow the country in real time.
Khalidi understood earlier than many that the archive of contemporary Bangladesh would no longer exist only in bound volumes of newspapers. It would be online and it would be searchable and immediate. He was equally impatient with the assumption that only print conferred seriousness.
When the Editors Guild was being established, Khalidi argued against the idea that a small group of newspaper editors could adequately represent a media audience already consuming journalism through the internet.
At bdnews24.com's 19th anniversary in 2025, Khalidi returned to the decision made in that Dhanmondi newsroom in October 2006.
"Overnight, the wait for news ended," he said. "The delay between the event and the bulletin vanished."
The economics of journalism have become harder and the politics became harsher too. The internet that once seemed to offer liberation from printing presses created new dependencies of its own but the newsroom clock Khalidi helped reset never moved backwards.
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