Hello Oddjob3691,
Sounds like you are hoping the Mac with Monterey will speak the News app stories to you. We'll do our best to assist with this.
According to the resource you came from: Listen to the news in the Apple News app - Apple Support
Apple News Today and audio stories are available only in English in the U.S. for iPhone, iPod touch, and CarPlay.
Which means, these are not supported at this time for a Mac.
With that said, you mentioned using this feature instead: Have your Mac speak text that’s on the screen - Apple Support
Customize how spoken text appears on the screen
1. On your Mac, choose Apple menu 
> System Preferences, click Accessibility 
, then click Spoken Content.
2. Select the “Speak selection” checkbox.
By default, your Mac speaks text when you press the keyboard shortcut Option-Esc. To set a different keyboard shortcut and change other settings, click Options:
- Keyboard shortcut: Press the key combination you want to use. For example, press the Option and Tab keys together to set the keyboard shortcut as Option+Tab.
- Highlight content: Click the pop-up menu, then choose to have words, sentences, or both highlighted as your Mac speaks. Click the “Word color” and “Sentence color” pop-up menus to choose the highlight color.
If you don’t want spoken content highlighted, choose Never from the “Highlight content” pop-up menu.
- Sentence style: Click the pop-up menu to have spoken sentences indicated by an underline or with a background color).
- Show controller: Click the pop-up menu to choose to automatically show the controller when you press the keyboard shortcut, or to never or always show it.
The controller is especially useful when your Mac is reading long pieces of text. You can use the controller to pause, resume, or stop the speaking, change the speaking rate, and skip ahead or backward in the text.
3. When you’re done choosing options, click OK.
We would go to System Preferences > Language and Region to make sure this information reflects correctly for your language and location.
We would also confirm this happens on all News stories and not just specific stories.
If you've taken all the correct steps to customize how spoken text appears on the screen and it still doesn't speak it properly, then it would be best to connect with Apple Support
Wishing you well, cheers.
