A newsreader is a Usenet News client program which provides an interface to Usenet News servers. Usenet News servers distribute publicly accessible discussion group "proceedings" to people all over the world, via the global Internet.

Threaded news clients organize Usenet news postings by keeping all responses listed together with the note responded to, so you can readily follow a discussion from the original post through all responses to the post and all responses to the responses. Each original post's subject becomes the subject of the thread. Your news reader only shows you the subject of each thread (while unthreaded newsreaders display a list of every note in the whole forum in time order - a virtual mess), and if you are interested in the thread, you select it, and the threaded newsreader displays each article in the list in the order the article was posted (Usenet News postings are called articles although they more closely resemble carefully composed post-it notes than what we typically think of when we use the word "article". The term is an anachronism from the original Usenet culture).

Currently, most Web browsers' newsreaders are not threaded, so the ability to access news through them is of limited value. Certainly this will change soon.