OC News Not working on Ubuntu 14.04 and PHP7

[aproposnix]

Explain the Problem

Feeds are no longer updating since upgrading to PHP7.

I installed PHP 5.6 as discussed in issue #967
Since the PHP5.6 PPA was deprecated, I was forced to do an upgrade to 7.

In the log file I see this line:
Fatal cron Failed to connect to the database: An exception occured in driver: could not find driver

System Information

• News app version: 8.8.0
• ownCloud version: Nextcloud 9.0.52 (previous Nextcloud versions affected as well)
• PHP version:
  php -v
  PHP 7.0.8-3+deb.sury.orgtrusty+1 (cli) ( NTS )
  Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
  Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
  with Zend OPcache v7.0.8-3+deb.sury.orgtrusty+1, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies
  with Xdebug v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 2002-2016, by Derick Rethans
• Database and version: mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.49, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.3
• Browser and version: N/A
• Distribution and version: Ubuntu 14.04

EDIT: Referenced wrong ticket. Corrected.