Influencing and Meltwater have agreed upon a clipping process for stories that span multiple pages, aiming to provide a consistent, experience with an easily understood and enforceable logic.

We define multi-page stories into two categories.

Continuations

Stories are defined as continuations if they run directly from one page to the other. That is the reader is expected to join the last word on one page, with the first word on the other. Standard protocol that outlets use to denote a continuation is to use the words “Continued on x”. The back-end of the continuation is typically denoted by “continued from”. Continuations may or may not have a headline identifier, but this headline identifier is usually the same, or an abridged version of the original headline.

Lead-ins

Stories are defined as lead-ins if an abridged version of a story is used to point readers to one or more stories on the following pages. Each story has a headline - these may or may not be the same. The lead-in story may be an abridged or summarised version of the main story, or it may be a graphic-based teaser/pointer.

We recognise that some clients would prefer to have lead-ins clipped as a single piece. However, they are clipped separately for the following reasons:

1) Simplicity and consistency. 

Lead-ins are inconsistent. They may point to one-story, they may point to multiple stories. They may use the first couple of pars or a story, or they may involve a re-write. They may have different headlines or they may use the same. Any other policy would become complex to manage, subjective and difficult to communicate to clients.

2) Reduce the number of re-clips

The clipping process is not a single-person, chronological effort. Stories are clipped based on a priority algorithm which rates the important of each clip. Because the stories that follow lead-ins do not generally identify that there is a lead-in connected to it, that story may be clipped first and at this point it becomes impossible to know there is a lead-in connected to it. It is unavoidable that some clips would not be properly linked, resulting in a higher-number of reclips. Another unavoidable consequence would be duplications, as the lead-in might be clipped with the following page, but the following page might also be clipped separately.

3) It assists searching

Often lead-ins have different headlines, and our experience was sometimes clients were conducting their searches based on one headline and mistaking that the clip was missed because it did not use the headline they were looking for.

4) It improves client metrics

Client counts are an important metric for many clients, and this policy improves their clip-count, which in turn provides them with better metrics to return to their stake-holders.