In this paper we propose an integration of a selforganizing map and semantic networks from WordNet for a text classification task using the new Reuters news corpus. This neural model is based on significance vectors and benefits from the presentation of document clusters. The Hypernym relation in WordNet supplements the neural model in classification. We also analyse the relationships of news headlines and their contents of the new Reuters corpus by a series of experiments. This hybrid approach of neural selforganization and symbolic hypernym relationships is successful to achieve good classification rates on 100,000 full-text news articles. These results demonstrate that this approach can scale up to a large real-world task and show a lot of potential for text classification.