ekb (12/06/82)
There are two lines in the manual page for news(5) which contain the character sequence "\\:". Since these are in macro arguments, they get translated to "\:", which the version of nroff we have then converts to a control-k character. What's more, our version of "col" then has a memory fault error when it tries to process this. I suggest that all you USENET administrators go into this manual page and change "\\:" to "\e:". Even if your local version of nroff and col don't misbehave like this, the manual page probably should still be changed as "\e" is really the correct way to get a printable "\" in nroff. - Eric Bustad (houx*!machaids!ekb)