Apple News isn't available in a lot of countries for whatever reason. So this not only means its inaccessible to non-iOS9 devices, but it's also inaccessible to, eg., all of New Zealand.
I noticed that on the iOS9 beta, with my region set to Canada, the News app was unavailable, but on the springboard search view, the embedded news items were from (two) Canadian sources. So it seems like they're working on it.