Thank you for the suggestion. The news I was after was usenet feeds, I have archives of some groups but thought it would be interesting to rather than go and read it all at once have it put a new days worth of posts every day from the past.

    As the messages are all in just text format with headers and timestamps I should just be able to extract the messages from a particular day and add them to my news reader, worst case changing the timestamp to today to have it appear in a sensible place and putting the original timestamp back where it can be seen when reading.