I’ve tried blocking the ads with a pi-hole, to no avail. I suspect the ads come from the same servers that the articles do. I can’t find obvious ad servers in the query logs. If anyone has a hint on blocking Apple News ads at DNS, I’d love to hear it.

1Blocker, with their in-app tracker blocking turned on, will block Apple News ads on iOS/iPadOS and will also block ads in Google News and free to play games. I guess you can’t block tracking without also blocking the ads. It installs a local VPN profile that blocks connections to hosts typically blocked with dns based ad blockers. They’ve increasingly hidden the feature in the app, for some reason.