Obsessed with the audience: breakfast television revisited

Breakfast TV identifies with the world of the television viewer. Though television as a whole is faced with the fact that viewing is mostly casual and intermittent, in the case of morning TV this is a much more fundamental aspect. Therefore breakfast television has consciously adopted the role of structuring and sustaining household routines, in order to become part of them. To find out how the diverse needs and interests of the morning audience are met, the authors have looked more closely at three building blocks of breakfast television programmes: scheduling, styling and setting. We have chosen as our main subjects of study three commercial breakfast magazines from three different countries (the United Kingdom, the United States and Finland).