Having recently upgraded to the latest MacOS Catalina, I discovered that the Apple App Store and Apple News no longer worked. Those two apps would just hang and a Force Quit would be required.
After numerous tests including a complete wipe of my HDD and re-install from the Internet (OPT+CMD+R) I was still seeing the same issue.
However, I was finally able to resolve this headache by simply creating a new Administrator user via System Preferences -> Users & Groups and deleting the old user.
Restarting the machine and logging in with the new user account and voila, Apple App Store and News started working again,