Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel visual analysis system called VASNRU(visual analysis system for news retrieval and understanding). It combines news data retrieval with visual analytics to help users retrieve and analyze news data. Given a user-specified query, VASNRU first retrieves a collection of news articles crawled from search engine. Then it automatically pre-processes the retrieved data for further analysis. VASNRU employs a text visual analysis toolkit called Mutual Ranker to support better analysis of the news data. We have used VASNRU to retrieve two real-world news datasets and performed analysis. The results demonstrated the effectiveness and usefulness of our approach to retrieve and analyze news data.