The free news app was, sadly, never free for all, and missed in a bunch of regions.

News seems to work just the same in the UK - mix of free and premium news stories

For us, the News app always did both. There was some amount of free content or you could subscribe to the News+ service and presumably others. Those release notes don’t include anything that looks like that changed, but I’ve been subscribed for years so can only see that use case