Anchor shot detection is a fundamental step for segmenting news video into stories. In this paper, a algorithm is developed for anchor shot detection based on face detection and SIFT. Face detection is first used to filter out the shots which do not have any face in the special area. Then, color histogram is used to judge whether two shots are similar, and the distinctive image features from scale-invariant key points are detected and matched to find groups of shots which may be anchor shots. Last, anchor shots are identified based on the same prior information of anchor shots. Compared with other algorithms, the significant advantage of the proposed algorithm is that the algorithm is based on neither the templates nor the learned classifiers. The method has been tested on many kinds of news video, which demonstrates its effectiveness.