Good point about forum thread email notifications. Maybe there is an efficient way to keep the official news only on the home page outside of the forum, but simply have a sticky thread in the forum where a link is posted to the latest news article posting, but not duplicate the data in the forum. And not simply have a huge running number of threads in the sticky thread.
Hmmm, seems an easier avenue to explore would be to see if there is a newsletter email blast tool for certain article posts. Again, the final idea would be so that only the news article has to be written and published once; and notification goes out. Instead of then having to do another process of duplicating efforts in the forum.
Given the articles are already being written in the Joomla (CMS) system, I would think it would be best to see what options are possible for notification.