ITV's Daybreak has said farewell to its third editor in three years with the exit of Karl Newton after less than a year in the job. Newton oversaw a new look for the troubled breakfast programme with presenters Lorraine Kelly and Aled Jones, but it remains an uphill battle in the ratings against BBC1's Breakfast. One edition of Daybreak earlier this week had 700,000 viewers, less than a third of the 2.2 million who watched Breakfast. Newton, who will be replaced on an interim basis by Neil Thompson, said he had an "absolute ball" at ITV and was "pleased to be leaving Daybreak having helped the programme turn a corner and having returned the breakfast format to it's journalistic roots, with politics, exclusives and popular investigative content". It is exactly a year since it was announced that Newton's predecessor, former Channel 5 News editor David Kermode, was leaving. Kermode replaced Ian Rumsey on the show, who in turn lasted less than a year. Daybreak replaced GMTV in September 2010 with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley on the sofa, but it flopped on launch and has been playing catch-up since.
