Newsgroups are separated on the line by commas. It will usually not reach you for another two hours on average, due to batching, propagation delays and deliberate delays required by contract. ClariNews articles contain References lines that can be used by newsreading tools such as trn or tin. If you have a newsreader that can understand these lines, you will see chains of updates grouped together. We decide which stories are updates and which stories are sidebars based on the slugword .
Every story is assigned a slugword by the wire service.
If the story is updated, it goes out again with the same slug. We use this to cancel the old story before issuing the update, so only one version of the story exists on each computer at any given time. Most slugwords are one to three English words, separated by hyphens. Slugwords don't really have a particular pattern. Generally the most important part of a story will be included in the slugword, but not always.