> I visited the home pages of those sites. I'm not sure how to open up stories if I were an internet user just passing by.
That's probably by design. The stories are meant to be discovered while searching on Google. Of course a site owner should have the common sense to include a separate section on their site for stories. In most CMSs, It would be as simple as setting a 'web stories' category, then adding a link to the navigation that takes them to a dynamically generated page, something like "example.com/web-stories/"
* https://nowthisnews.com/stories/paralympic-swimmer-builds-ma...
* https://www.lonelyplanet.com/stories/5-destinations-to-see-w...
What I don't see:
* I visited the home pages of those sites. I'm not sure how to open up stories if I were an internet user just passing by.
* I don't see a way to exit the stories experience other than clicking a link/article
* How to open a story from any web page on a desktop (It is called "Web Stories" so I assumed a few things)
This seems to be build on top of AMP:
* https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
* https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/integrate...