This typically means that in the spool there is a directory in 
the spool that thinks it is a file.  This seems to happen when
the machine running innd crashes, and the spool gets corrupted.
Fsck then tries to make sense of the mess it finds; sometimes
it guesses wrong.

Here is a little script that finds the offending file and disposes
of if:

#!/bin/sh
#  
# change this line to your news spool
NEWS_LOC=/var/spool/news
 
find ${NEWS_LOC} -type f -print |  # list all files
        tr -d [0-9] |              # get rid of numbers
        grep -v "overview" |       # get rid of .overview files
        egrep -v "/$" |            # everything w/ / at end of line
        sed -s "s/^/rm /" |        # put rm in front of file
        sh -s                      # it's history
or alternatively:

find ${NEWS_LOC} -type f -name "[a-z]*" -print | xargs rm

(From: Carlso Castro <carlos@mci.net> and Matthias Urlichs <urlichs@noris.net>)

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.