Although the current version no longer has a wizard for creating user selected topics it is still very easy to create a custom RSS feed about any topic you want.
If for example you want to create a custom feed for news about cats from Google you would create a new feed and enter:
" http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=cats&ie=UTF-8&output=atom " (do not enter quotes) and name it Cats (or whatever you want)

or if you wanted to find out current news about the All Blacks on Yahoo you would enter:
" http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=All%20Blacks&ei=UTF-8 " name it and you are away.

These are in essence searches conducted every time the feed updates but very handy nevertheless. The only drawback is some times for searches with multiple terms a random article that has them in it will show up but overall a really hand feature and a reason I enjoy using Newsfire.