To Örebro University

The mediatization of politics refers to a process by which media institutions become increasingly powerful actors in society, making political activities and policy making dependent on journalistic demands and media logic. This paper highlights the new interrelationships between politicians and journalists that have occurred in connection with the rise of political communication on social media platforms. Political actors, previously positioned outside the realm of media, have now incorporated social media use into their communication strategies, thus, journalists are now facing politicians in a multimodal communication environment. Whereas previous studies on Twitter have analysed news topics on Twitter, or news coverage of Twitter as a phenomenon, this paper maps some of the essential factors that can explain how and to which extent Twitter messages by Swedish politicians are used in journalistic content.

Using content analysis, this paper scrutinizes the total amount of tweets originated from politicians that made it into the news, in four large daily newspapers. The study examines in what contexts Tweets are used as sources, what news topics political tweets are part of, the actors behind the tweets, the geographical aspects of the political issue, and to what extent tweets pertain to the political or personal dimensions. The paper include a theoretical framework for the study, reflections on the content analysis and the result of a pilot study that examines the impact of politicians’ tweets in news.