Full disclosure, this post was mainly prompted by an e-mail from Rich Skrenta, Topix.net's CEO, although I had his posts bookmarked for further review.
There's been a couple of interesting effects around Topix's introduction of forums beside their automated news gathering tools. First, they ditched forum registration and participation went up along with quality. Second, the forum for Caruthersville,MO became a coordination spot for citizens after a series of deadly storms and a tornado ripped through the small town.
I'm not sure I'd call the forum citizen's journalism as Rich does, but I agree with the tail of his post where a challenge of the modern news organization is to "enrich and enable communities of readers with voices of their own." Topix is demonstrating effective engineering of discussion forums in conjunction with news. As Vin Crosbie points out, cesspool forums is a tired old story that still crops up (cf Washington Post) in the news industry. Any new paradigms to deal with the problem should be warmly greeted.
I wonder if Topix could use some of its blog mining techniques on forums to surface and highlight really useful forum posts. I'll leave unanswered how to measure utility, but at that point I'd really start to call the forums citizen's journalism.