I really don't think many newbies have even heard of usenet, these days, let alone are all that likely to turn to comp.lang.lisp for help.
A college kid looking for assistance with lisp these days is likely to hit up StackOverflow or /r/lisp or /r/scheme or one of the clojure communities depending on what they're using. Any of these are less 'hidden' than usenet, which happily has fallen into enough obscurity that c.l.l.'s toxicity will slowly die for lack of new blood.
It is "the Lisp community" in the sense that there is no other widely known, recommended way to get in touch with people using Lisp. The community may exist somwhere else, but they are hidden from newbies, whose first contact with the community still is the cesspit that is c.l.l, often by the spam ridden Google Groups interface.