[stephengillie]

I bet their automated system is re-inserting GA code every time it updates their stub. It probably copies the entire previous stub, GA code and all, then publishes that plus updates and fresh GA code.

From the article:

Stub stories work like this: You write the first installment like any other story. But when more news breaks, you go back to the article, insert an update at the top, and change the headline and subheadline to reflect the update. Our system updates the story "slug" when the headline changes--check the URL of this story, and you'll see words from the headline in the URL: /this-is-what-happens-when-publishers-invest-in-long-stories. But the number preceding the slug--on this article, it's 3009577--is a unique node ID which never changes. So essentially, every time we update an article, we get a fresh URL with a fresh headline, but pointing back to the same (newly updated) article.

We can check this by checking older stubs.

Edit: on checking the page source, I only see GA in there 2x - once to call a GA API from google-analytics.com, and once more to (I think) load ga.js from google-analytics.com. How many times do you see that page calling GA?