Well, if you look up
"CES Site News" on here, it does pretty much what you're asking.
You can designate a News forum, which changes the Forum Display to show the first post of each thread. I believe you can also designate how much of the post to show before the "Read More" link.
However, I had lots of trouble with getting it to work, and the template for the actual thread view needs a lot of work. You should give it a try.