DR’s morning news program P1 Morgen marked 25 years on the air on September 3, 2026, a quarter century after a launch that drew protests from the church, politicians and staff inside DR itself.
The Danish public broadcaster DR reports that the first edition of P1 Morgen aired on September 3, 2001. Host Karen Secher walked into a studio in the old radio house on Rosenørns Allé in Copenhagen with the script printed out. She says in the anniversary broadcast that she was extremely nervous that morning.
Since then, P1 has aired three hours of live morning radio every weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. The station has also broadcast live for one or more hours on some weekends. According to DR, that adds up to roughly 6,500 editions of the program.
The church was not happy
Before P1 Morgen, church broadcasts and classical music had filled the morning hours for decades. DR notes that the change drew protests from the church, from the political landscape and from within the broadcaster. The day after the first edition, Kristeligt Dagblad published a cool review asking for the names of those behind the decision.
Leif Lønsmann, DR’s radio director from 1998 to 2008, helped invent the program. He says that out of DR’s roughly 3,000 employees at the time, only about five to seven people thought it was a good idea. Lønsmann, who left DR eight years ago, describes the program as born under resistance.
Because of the opposition, the program launched on a foundation of compromises. For its first five years, each edition still included a short religious segment called “Ved dagens begyndelse”, in which a priest reflected on life. That element was dropped in 2006.
Listeners sent more than 400 messages
To mark the anniversary, P1 Morgen opened its text message thread for praise and criticism during Thursday’s broadcast. DR reports that more than 400 text messages arrived over the course of the morning. Many listeners described the program as a fixed part of their morning routine, often during the commute to work.
Listener Eva Høegh told the program that it generally takes up relevant subjects and handles them sensibly. Her main criticism concerns language, and she argues that the hosts are role models who should avoid grammatical errors. She says she sometimes switches off the radio over a misused word, then turns it back on the next morning.
Lønsmann says the original vision was a paperless morning newspaper, which the team called an electronic morning newspaper. The idea was that listeners with busy mornings would feel updated by the time they reached work, without television, the internet or a printed paper. He says the program still lives up to that ambition.
DR describes today’s P1 Morgen as almost entirely live segments, with a strong focus on current affairs and the day’s news stories. A team of journalists, hosts and editors meets each day to prepare the broadcasts.
