"Bergensavisen" had a predecessor in Arbeidervennen, founded by the Danish trade unionist Sophus Pihl in 1885. When he died in 1888, a group of trade unionists and idealists continued his work. The newspaper "Arbeidet", started as a daily in December 1893. They sold their newspaper to Bergens Arbeiderparti, the local affiliation of the Norwegian Labour Party in 1905. However, the Labour Party went through two party splits in the 1920s. As the Labour Party joined Comintern in 1919, a group broke away in 1921 to form the Social Democratic Labour Party. This group founded a new newspaper "Bergens Social-Demokrat" in 1922. The next year, the Labour Party left Comintern. As a result, the pro-Comintern faction broke away to form the Communist Party. In the city of Bergen, the communists controlled the local Labour Party chapter Bergens Arbeiderparti, and its newspaper "Arbeidet". When the social democrats had lost the power struggle, the victorious communists changed the journalism of their newspaper from social democracy to communism in 1922, erased the local news and published long political articles, chasing their readers away from the newspaper.