This Europe: Danes' first paper for 50 years seeks independent view

Denmark's first new national newspaper since the Second World War hit the newsstands yesterday. Dagen (The Day), a morning daily on sale from Monday to Saturday, and boasting commentators including Will Hutton, Henry Kissinger and Salman Rushdie, costs 15 kroner (£1.30), some 25 per cent more than most Danish papers.

The paper, which describes itself as a "paper for people who can read, from people who can write" has ditched the traditional short story format in favour of longer analyses and claims to have departed from the party politics of the Danish press. "If politics is about ideas and opinions, then Dagen is indeed an extraordinarily political newspaper. But if politics is about leaning to the right or left then we hereby opt out," the paper said in its debut editorial.

The editor, Kresten Schultz Joergensen, declared a sellout of its initial circulation of 13,000. "The case in Britain 15 years ago is definitely the case in Denmark where the major papers are formally linked to certain political ideologies," said Mr Joergensen, formerly political editor of the liberal broadsheet Politiken, editor of a small social democratic newspaper and regional communications director for Coca-Cola. "Just as The Independent evolved from calls for a paper that moved more freely in the political landscape, we are a newspaper that moves away from the political stereotypes, acknowledging Denmark is becoming a more international society."

His target audience is affluent, educated young people, "children of the 70s and 80s", who, he believes, will snap up the tabloid. "The traditional, rather provincial outlook throughout Scandinavia is changing," he said. "We are fed up with the almost racist debates that take place in this country."

The Danish newspaper market is dominated by three large national dailies and two tabloids, as well as some two dozen smaller nationwide and regional papers and two free newspapers. Dagen is owned by Copenhagen-based Atlas Publishing, whose founder and manager, Peter Linck, has spent some 45 million kroner (£3.9million) on the newspaper.

In a market facing declining readership and layoffs, the launch of Dagen was praised as a bold move by its competitors. Berlingske Tidende, a Copenhagen daily, said yesterday: "It is commendable that it dares to aim for quality in a time when nonsense and pop are increasingly visible in the media picture," but pointed out that quality already exists – "you have it in your hands".