Disclosed are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for analyzing an event via social media. A system configured to practice the method segments a document associated with an event based on a plurality of inferred topics to yield a plurality of segments. Next, the system assigns each message in a corpus of messages associated with the event to one of the inferred topics to yield assigned topics. The messages can include at least one of a status update, a tweet, a blog post, a tag, a chat message, a comment, and a check-in. Moreover, the messages can originate from different social networks. Based on the assigned topics, the system then associates each message in the corpus of messages with at least one of the document, a segment from the plurality of segments, and a segment of the event.