Given the intention of creating a system that will be useful for filtering Net News, it is crucial that the system be designed in such a way that the system supports the users. In order to help our users, we needed to find out how they currently go about reading Net News so our system could be consistent with their demands. To achieve this end, we instrumented two of the news reader programs in use at PARC to record information about how their users read Net News. The subsections that follow describe our method for collecting the experimental data and a summary of our analysis.