country. Asian University for Women was established in Chittagong in 2008 as the second International University in the country after IUT. Number of private universities continued to grow rapidly throughout the decade. By the end of 2000s there were at least 55 registered private universities, but not all of them were recognized for their quality. However, some of the older private universities expanded and moved to larger campus in this decade. Mass media In the 1990s the country saw explosive growth in the number of newspapers in publication. The trend continued in the following decade. Jugantar and Samakal were the two notable additions to the landscape of daily newspapers in the 2000s. Moreover, country's first online news outlet, bdnews24.com, started its operation in 2005 which was a transformative change for the print media of the country. Earlier online Bangladeshi newspapers were merely a static copy of the printed version, but bdnews24.com and later prothom-alo.com started giving realtime news updates on their site - which revolutionalized dissemination of information in Bangladesh. Although BTV launched BTV World in 2016 it faced fierce competition from private TV Channels. One notable development in 2000 was the launch of the country's first private terrestrial TV channel - Ekushey TV (ETV), which covered half the country's population and "turned out to be the most popular channel offering brisk, highly professional, and path-breaking programmes". However, in 2002 the BNP-led Government shutdown ETV, on the ground of technical reasons, but the conventional wisdom was that the channel was being punished for its partisan role. In the post ETV era, many new private TV channels mushroomed and competed with older channels to take a share of audiences. NTV, RTV, Banglavision, Boishakhi TV and Desh TV were among the new channels which started their journey in this period. While Television viewership persistently increased from 31% in 1995 to 42% in 1998 and 61% in 2002; the number of people with radio exposure decreased from 42% to 24.1% from 1998 to 2002. The rapid increase in availability of television from the late 1990s and the subsequent years was the major reason behind the fall of radio listenership. Although private TV channels were already available, the radio network was still controlled by state-owned Bangladesh Betar in this decade. Awards and recognitions Abdullah Abu Sayeed, the Founder of Bishwo Shahitto Kendro, was awarded Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2004. ATN Bangla won the special