You could do a few things:
1. Create the structure like you show in your content tree. For instance, create News/<year>/News Items. Then use either a nested repeater to display the <year> and news items or a
Hierarchical Viewer to display the year and news items.
2. Leave the structure as News/news items and create a query to get the distinct year values, then use a custom query repeater to display those values and nest another repeater inside there to display the actual news items.