Story link detection has been regarded as a core technology for other Topic Detection and Tracking tasks such as new event detection. In this paper we analyze story link detection and new event detection in a retrieval framework and examine the effect of a number of techniques, including part of speech tagging, new similarity measures, and an expanded stop list, on the performance of the two detection tasks. We present experimental results that show that the utility of the techniques on the two tasks differs, as is consistent with our analysis.