The flow of news articles through C news is as follows:
a batch is received by some network service and passed to rnews,
which invokes $NEWSBIN/input/newsspool to queue the batch in $NEWSARTS/in.coming;
eventually $NEWSBIN/input/newsrun will be run by cron,
it uncompresses any files in.coming and
either hands the article to $NEWBIN/relay/relaynews locally or invokes
relaynews over a network connection on its file server.

relaynews writes the name of each spool file onto the ends of batch files
for neighbours.  Eventually cron runs $NEWSBIN/batch/sendbatches, which
batches up the outgoing articles and transmits them over some network.
