Remove items from News on SharePoint Communication Site

@Jonathan Herschel I know I'm late to the party with this suggestion, and you've probably moved on from that immediate client need.  But here's an alternative approach that may help folks with this same issue.

There are certain News articles that are important and need more visibility than a normal article.   Maybe they're reminders for an important company event or deadline, and you want them front & center up to a certain date--but after the date passes, you no longer want to promote them.  They're regular news articles in every way, except they need to be highlighted for a while.

By changing their Promote state, they will no longer appear in the consolidated news archive which is a valuable historical reference of all news.  I would like to retain all news there, unfortunately changing the promote property will remove them from this feature of the SharePoint home page.

This alternative approach is to add 2 Metadata fields for the Contributor to use only on items they wish to Highlight.  One field flags if they wish to highlight, the second is a date field for them to define the expiration date for the highlight.  Then use the Highlighted Content web part to filter these items and reveal them with either the "Cards" view or the "Carousel" view.  I've titled the web part "Don't Miss News"

HERE'S THE STEPS:

1. Create a Multiple Choice column in the Site Pages library that has "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" as the 2 choices. Title this column "Highlight"
2. Create a Date Column in the Site Pages library.  Title this column "Highlight Expires"
3. Enter some test data in these new fields
• At a minimum create 3 items that are flagged "Highlight" and give one each the expiration dates of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
4. Go to the page you want to reveal these items on, and add a Highlighted Content web part to the page.
5. Configure it as I have in the screen capture.

EXTRA TIPS:

Once you experience this highlight technique, you'll likely find lots of ways to use it, I know I have.  So here's a couple extra tips so you can get more distance from it.

You can do this with 1-off columns, but I like to use this "Highlight" technique for lots of things throughout my SharePoint ecosystem, so I have created the columns as Site Columns on all my sites.  Additionally, for the Yes/No Highlight field, I prefer to use a Managed Metadata field with a simple term set of "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" as the options.  This gives me more options when using the new Metadata Properties features, which don't work with the Boolean Yes/No field today.  I just find I get more "bang for the buck" as the descriptions are more clear to contributors, and I can use it for additional functionality.

• Show the "Highlight" status on the page, using the Page Properties Web Part.
• Create a "Featured Content" Term Set that contains "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" Terms
• This is required because the Metadata functionality recently introduced:
• Only works with Managed Metadata
• Doesn't work with the Boolean yes/no field, but does work with choice fields
• I prefer to set this up as a tenant-wide term store, rather than on an individual site, because once you use it, you'll find all sorts of other things you want to use it for.
• Create the columns as Site Columns, so they can be easily reused without having to configure each time.

Cheers!