On servers i check there seems to be no news at all.
Perhaps... I follow several newsgroups... some are general usenet comp.*, others are Novell and openSUSE's own forums which have nntp as well. So... I still use nntp anyhow.
cjcox, which servers are you using? Are they commercial or free? In those groups you follow, how active are users, how many messages in what time? On the servers i had a look at in many groups there was only one post in each of them. When getting news from there, programs often refuse to accept post because those posts are too old - like from year 2002, for example. Those servers look like abandoned, dead, with no activity at all.
I use free servers... google around or PM me... no sense in ruining a good thing by having a mess load of people hammer the freebies...