545A - 100 Years from the Founding of Visir

At the beginning of the 20th century editor Jon Olafsson decided that times were ripe for a newspaper in the Icelandic capital and started publishing Dagblaðið. The Ritzau News Agency sent its first cables to Iceland in 1906 – the first foreign news agency to do so. The Dagblaðið experiment soon came to an end. Another attempt at news publication was made by Einar Gunnarsson in December 1910. The name of the newspaper was “Vísir til dagblaðs í Reykjavík”, later shortened to Vísir. This was the beginning of an era of Icelandic newspapers. Vísir was primarily a metropolitan newspaper. Three years after the founding of Visir Vilhjálmur Finsen founded Morgunblaðið with big Danish newspapers as a model. At first Morgunblaðið was also primarily a metropolitan newspaper but later became the largest circulated newspaper in the country.