There is one hands-down favorite news reader for Mac users: NewsWatcher. The most popular versions are John Norstad's NewsWatcher [618K] and Brian Clark's NewsWatcher [1011K]. YA-NewsWatcher has the advantage of supporting killfiles, which allow you to filter out subjects and authors you would rather not read, or even highlight the ones you want to read first.

If your Internet provider charges by the hour, or you just don't want to tie up the phone while you're reading the news, grab a copy of MacSOUP 2.0 [533K] (US$20 shareware but don't worry its Free). The latest version will work over a TCP/IP connection, though the old shell stuff is still in there if you want it.

Cindy's Newsmailer

Cindy's Newsmailer is a new, incredibly feature-filled $40 shareware offline HyperCard-based mail and Usenet newsreader. It works in the background, has message filtering and filing, address book and form letter capabilities, and works with both MacTCP and shell accounts. You need HyperCard Player 2.1 or later to use this program. See Cindy's Home Page for more information.

InterNews

InterNews is a reasonably good newsreader that supports multithreading. InterNews uses a three-paned window and allows you to keep multiple sets of group lists in a single user file. It's slower and less feature-filled than the various NewsWatchers, however.

Nuntius

Another powerful, free newsreader. It offers a hierarchical full group listing and a novel interface.

TheNews

A shareware UUCP-based newsreader.

Value-Added NewsWatcher

Since John Norstad releases the source code to the free NewsWatcher program for people to change, there are two variants of the program that add many features. VA-NW, as it is popularly known, adds filtering, automatic binary posting, support for anonymous remailing--among other things--to the base Newswatcher. It's an excellent program.