A portal launched as the online edition of a planned daily closed in six and a half months with about 30 staff

Sarakkhon was meant to come out as a daily newspaper. Because of the Covid outbreak that plan was postponed, and on 25 September 2020 the news portal was launched instead as the online version of the proposed daily. According to the management, about 30 staff worked on the portal. The chairman of one private bank headed its editorial board, and the wife of another bank chairman was its publisher, so it had well-resourced owners behind it. Even so, the portal did not last. In April 2021 the second wave of the coronavirus made publishing the daily uncertain once again. The editor told Prothom Alo that in this situation the owners did not want to keep carrying the organisation's losses, so the portal was declared closed. On Sunday afternoon, 11 April 2021, the management announced its decision not to run the portal any more. Sarakkhon thus shut about six and a half months after launch. Another online portal owned by someone linked to the owners was still running at the time. The case shows a portal set up not as a business that earns on its own, but as an early piece of a print newspaper plan; once the main plan stalled, there was no longer a reason to keep a loss-making portal going.