I'm not sure whether moving these discussions to the news forum is a good idea in the abstract, but there has definitely been less discussion of those articles since the move. It may be worth a longer experiment, but it doesn't look successful right now.
Probably takes some getting used to, but being on the news page and in the newsletter lets them reach ten times the audience that burying them in the forum does. What we are seeing is an increase in new users (not just new registrations, but also registered users who don't tend to scour the forums) posting in those threads, while the older users are not so much. The key is persuading those users to do so, but if they really don't want to then then they're not going to.