There seems a growing consensus on the personalisation of politics, meaning that not parties but more and more individual politicians have become the central actors in politics. The media, and especially television, are given a prominent role in this tendency towards 'candidate centred politics'. In this article we discuss the role of newspapers in this regard. Is there a more personalised and less party political way of reporting in the written press? On the basis of a longitudinal study (1958-1999) of two Flemish newspapers we found only a modest and gradual tendency towards a personalisation of politics. Political parties have not been removed to the backstage of political reporting and remain a dominant player in the written press.