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

Actually the one thing that has tempted me to stop is when other services include articles that are clearly just adds to subscribe to them. I’m not paying for an ad service, but Apple has in general kept it legit