This document defines the standard format for interchange of Network News articles among USENET sites. It describes the format for articles themselves, and gives partial standards for transmission of news. The news transmission is not entirely standardized in order to give a good deal of flexibility to the individual hosts to choose transmission hardware and software, whether to batch news, and so on.
There are five sections to this document. Section two section defines the format. Section three defines the valid control messages. Section four specifies some valid transmission methods. Section five describes the overall news propagation algorithm.