USENET news (commonly referred to as netnews) is a distributed
messaging system, implemented as a software system that runs over
a variety of network protocols (UUCP, NNTP).  The basic unit of
transmission is the ``article''.  Articles are logically grouped
(at creation time) into one or more ``newsgroups'', which are
roughly categorized by content or subject matter.  Currently, all
widely deployed news transmission protocols are either based over
TCP or UUCP.
 
The purpose of this meeting is to discuss using multicast IP
datagrams for the dissemination of netnews articles, along with
the challenges inherent in adapting connection oriented protocols
to a connectionless, multicast model.  Particular care in defining
the multicast news protocol at the packet level will be
paramount to the success of this group.