So there is a Kagi news product :

https://kite.kagi.com/

As far as I can tell it’s free to use, even though Kagi is a paid product.

AI warning, though, if you consider that enshitified. They group similar articles from different sources together then have an AI summary plus links to the articles.

First go to the settings and add New Zealand to the categories (and delete any you don’t want), then go back to the results and click the New Zealand tab to see NZ news.

For out of the box solutions, that’s the only one I came across that isn’t big tech and that covers NZ news specifically.

Special mention to https://newsasfacts.com/ which looks cool but doesn’t have an NZ specific feed, it uses Wikipedia to identify current events and provides a non-biased Wikipedia summary. Not sure how they justify charging a subscription for the work of Wikipedia editors though 🤷 (Edit: On closer inspection, it’s currently a couple of bucks a month or $15USD a year to get an email, support/feature requests, theming, etc. They can probably justify that cost to pay for the running of the site, but it seems to literally just be this wikipedia page reformatted )

But one other option, RSS. You can subscribe to feeds from news websites like RNZ, NZH, Stuff, etc. Stuff’s RSS feeds are hard to find but are listed at the bottom here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350152237/whats-new-stuffs-bold-bright-website-and-apps

The others came up with a web search.

The downside of RSS is there are so many articles, how do you prioritise them? Probably with keywords of things you’re interested in or something like that. It also doesn’t automatically group similar articles together. 😆