Susanna Griso

At 4:30 in the morning at the studio in San Sebastián de los Reyes, there's no glamour at all. Susanna Griso has spent half her life walking in at this hour through security with press folders and a strong coffee in hand.

Born in Barcelona in 1969 into a large family tied to the cava wine business, she completed a degree in Journalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the early 1990s. Her first paycheck came from Ràdio Sant Cugat, where she learned to splice magnetic tape with a razor blade and adhesive tape.

Nobody handed her a close-up.

Later came local news on TV3 and interview shows such as Tres senyores i un senyor. On Catalan public television, she refined a clean diction and a direct tone that soon caught attention in Madrid.

Sharing the Set with Matías Prats

In 1997, she made the leap to Televisión Española to anchor L’Informatiu on the Catalan circuit. The experience was short-lived, as a call from private television soon came.

Antena 3 was planning a complete overhaul of its news division in 1998 and brought Griso in to join Matías Prats on the midday edition. For eight years, that desk kept more than two and a half million daily viewers glued to the screen.

The newscast was a tightly timed format where every segment lasted exactly as scheduled. But Griso was looking for a more unpredictable style.

She wanted mud and live TV with no safety net.

The Trench: Four Hours a Day

In December 2006, the network tasked her with transforming Espejo Público into a morning magazine show with over three hours of live programming. The challenge was huge, since the morning slot was firmly dominated by Telecinco.

Griso set a fast pace built on breaking news, unfiltered political debates, and on-the-ground live reports. In 2006, she won her first Ondas Award for Best TV Presenter, an honor she repeated in 2017 when the show itself won the award for Best Current Affairs Program.

Her on-screen presence went beyond the debate table. Filmmaker Santiago Segura included her in 2011 with a brief cameo playing herself in Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis, and in 2017 her voice and image covering the assault on the Fábrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre served as a realistic anchor in several episodes of the series Money Heist.

Controversy was no stranger to her over the years either. She clashed heatedly with political leaders from across the spectrum and had to weather on-air judicial corrections.

In September 2023, the show's management brought in Alberto Díaz as head of the social news segment to speed up the pace of the final stretch. She surpassed 4,500 morning broadcasts after signing her contract renewal with Atresmedia in 2024 to extend her on-air presence until 2027.