Thank you for the prompt to check out news, I'm in Australia, so just had to change the region to USA as noted in this forum elsewhere (you can leave your language as "English (Australia)".
The news app is clean and quite good, not sure about the fixed layout (will need to poke around), love that it marks items as read (unlike flipboard, would be great if they changed this one item) and also love that I can add "topics" rather then just news sources (still looking for a replacement to Zite.....love it, but is on it's last legs).
PS - I tried to turn my region back to Australia, to see if it would let me keep the "News" app, sadly it was no longer available on springboard, changed my region back and it came back, along with all my customisation.