Twitter as a new form of social media can potentially contain much useful information, but content analysis on Twitter has
not been well studied. In particular, it is not clear whether as an information source Twitter can be simply regarded as a
faster news feed that covers mostly the same information as traditional news media. In This paper we empirically compare the
content of Twitter with a traditional news medium, New York Times, using unsupervised topic modeling. We use a Twitter-LDA
model to discover topics from a representative sample of the entire Twitter. We then use text mining techniques to compare
these Twitter topics with topics from New York Times, taking into consideration topic categories and types. We also study
the relation between the proportions of opinionated tweets and retweets and topic categories and types. Our comparisons show
interesting and useful findings for downstream IR or DM applications.
Keywords Twitter – microblogging – topic modeling