Well merlyn gave the best answer, but you can actually subclass off of LWP if you need to. What you can do is create a new protocol. The package-name needs to be of the form LWP::Protocol::foo, and it needs to inherit from LWP::Protocol. To get a sample, take a look at how LWP::Protocol::https is implemented, subclassing off of http.

None of which you really need to know unless you are trying to figure out how LWP works, or are trying to write a new scheme.

ObRandomThought: Having read the code, I am wondering why the heck they have the hack to pass news to nntp in the implementor method of LWP::Protocol. Why not just have a trivial LWP::Protocol::news module that just inherits from LWP::Protocol::nntp?