Network News Transfer Protocol
(NNTP) A protocol defined in RFC 977 for the distribution, inquiry, retrieval and posting of Usenet news articles over the Internet. It is designed to be used between a news reader client such as nn or GNUS and a news server. It is normally used on a connection to TCP port 119 on the news server. NNTP is a simple ASCII text protocol so even if you don't have a news reader program, you can just connect to the server using telnet:
telnet news 119
where news is the name of your server (e.g. news.doc.ic.ac.uk). Typing HELP will give a list of other commands.