“Old News, New Communication? How Politicians Use Traditional Media in Their New Media”

Nowadays, politicians are able to directly inform and interact with citizens. They can bypass the traditional media as a result of the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. This has fundamentally changed the political communication process. An important strategy that politicians use on social media is sharing traditional news messages. This practise of news sharing is commonly used by all users of social media. Although there is ample research on news sharing on social media in general, there are almost no studies that look at the news sharing behaviour of politicians. On top of that, most studies that have been conducted on news sharing, have been confined to the US and used Twitter as their primary source of information. That is why, in this paper we study how often politicians use traditional news messages, from which media outlets, if it is favourable for the own party or negative for other parties, and whether they add any framing to the news item when they share news articles on social media. We do this by studying both Twitter and Facebook posts by 269 Belgian politicians for a period of 6 months. In this way, we hope to contribute to the growing literature on the integration of old and new media use in the field of Political Communication.