The emergence of big data and new technology has brought new research methods to communication scholars.However，massive data sets of communication are challenging the traditional，human-driven approaches to content analysis.Computational methods help scholars tackle the big data base more efficiently and accurately，however，the computer is unable to understand the subtleness and richness of human language.The solution is to combine the computational methods with the manual methods.With a detail case study of the news twitter analysis，the research shows the strength of combing two different content research methods in communication research in the era of big data.The ethics in big data analysis is also discussed in the study.