Dear Class - please read the following two papers.  
Together they give you an indication of how NewsStand works.

1.  H. Samet, J. Sankaranarayanan, M. D. Lieberman, M. D. Adelfio, B. C. Fruin, J. M. Lotkowski, D. Panozzo, J. Sperling, B. E. Teitler
Reading news with maps by exploiting spatial synonyms.
Communications of the ACM, 57(10):64-77, October 2014.
(Cover article of the October CACM issue. Video specially made by ACM)
Categories: [spatio-textual search engine]
link to paper:  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/pubs/cacm-newsstand.pdf
link to video:  http://vimeo.com/106352925

2.  M. D. Lieberman, H. Samet
Supporting rapid processing and interactive map-based exploration of
streaming news.
In I. Cruz, C. A. Knoblock, P. Kroger, E. Tanin, and P. Widmayer,
editors, Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGSPATIAL International
Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, pages
179-188, Redondo Beach, CA, November 2012.
Categories: [spatio-textual search engine].
link to paper:  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/pubs/newsstand-arch.pdf