Hey Jim,
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer so thoroughly! 
So basically, most of my articles are clipped in full and saved either as PNG/PDFs. Ideally I guess I would like to display a clean main image + title and short intro, and when you click on it, it either expands or navigates to the clipped article PNG, if that makes sense? Saves me having to edit any existing copy/create ‘new’ articles with old content.
My current portfolio has a very simple grid gallery, and when you click on any of the tiles it expands to show the content file (in this case a PNG) - like so (left is the tile, right is the expanded article.)
Not sure if that makes sense? 