This study aims to study some similarities and differences in content, vocabulary and linguistic features of maritime safety news and maritime security news in self-built corpora through the two strategies of keyword extraction: comparison against a representative general English corpus and cross-validation. It is found that the content of the maritime safety news is concerned with the safety of operation process, safe regulation, and the recent topic: Covid-19, which is to report the safety of the ship and related personnel. On the other hand, the content of the maritime security news is focused on pirate attacks, robberies, and other external factors of security. Cross-validation shows that maritime safety news prefers to use modal verbs, while maritime security news prefers to use the passive voice. We also explore which syntactic pattern is preferred through adjacent collocates of ‘safety' and ‘security' in both of the news. In addition, we investigate their window span (-5 to +5) collocation through examination of several statistical measures to find out similarities and differences between a pair of near-synonyms ‘safety' and ‘security' used in the two corpora.