1. A method of detecting new events comprising the steps of: determining at least one story characteristic based on at least one of: an average story similarity story characteristic and a same event-same source story characteristic; determining a source-identified story corpus, each story associated with at least one event; determining a source-identified new story associated with at least one event; determining story-pairs based on the source-identified new-story and each story in the source-identified story corpus; determining at least one inter-story similarity metric for the story-pairs; determining at least one adjustment to the inter-story similarity metrics based on at least one story characteristic; and determining if the event associated with the new story is similar to the events associated with the source-identified story corpus based on the inter-story similarity metrics and the adjustments.