Discovering Trending Topics from the Tweets By Odia News Media During Covid-19

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown imposed due to it has fueled the news consumption significantly. News portals including the ones in Odia language are actively feeding news related to Covid-19 to their consumers via their websites and Twitter handles. The news items didn't restrict to Covid-19 alone; they also touched a variety of domains of life like education, healthcare, administration, politics, movies, etc. Discovery of the news trends provides a bird’s eye view of the issues and topics that are popular in the online community. This could be of interest to advertisers, marketers, researchers, sociologists, and policymakers. This paper applies Topic Modeling to discover the trends from the tweets made by the Odia news media from 20th March 2020 to 31st August 2020, the period which saw the emergence of both lockdowns and unlocks in India. We found that during this period the Odia news media didn’t restrict themselves to report news surrounding Covid-19; rather they reported other happenings as well.