How to Demote News page from Team site and Remove it from Hub News Rollup

[Deleted]

With SharePoint hub sites being live for some time now, a few questions have come up on how you can demote news or remove it from a News Webpart without deleting it, and or also remove it from a Hub site with News webpart using "All sites in the Hub" as the source.

I am going to go over how you can accomplish both demoting the page from the site it's on, but also cover an additional step to make sure the news article also gets removed from the hub sourced news webpart. 

I have a feeling we will get a "Demote" button before too long in the UI but for now this is the work around :). 

Demote a page from News to a page

To demote a page we have to change it's "Promoted State" value from 2 to 0. But performing this task requires a few customized views to be able to achieve. To change this value do the following:

1. Navigate to the Pages/Site Pages library on your Team site you wish to demote news from.

2. Change the view to the All pages view. 

3. Next Click the + symbol to the right of the columns listed and choose "Show/Hide Columns"

Now select Promoted State from the list and make sure to click "Apply"

4. Now click on the Promoted State column header and choose Filter. Change the filter to 2. You must have a news page in your library for 2 to be an option. This will show all news pages on your site. 

5. Now click on the view name and choose Save view as the enter All News Pages and click Save.

6. Now you have a view you can reference to see all News Posts, but from here you can make use of the "Quick Edit" command and change the "Promoted State" Value of pages from 2 to 0. Click "Quick Edit" then click the Promoted State column value you want to change, then replace the 2 with a 0.

7. Click on Exit

Your page(s) will now be demoted from the Site that it is associated with and will no longer show in the news for that site. However the item will still show up in a hub site using a news webpart set to use "All sites in the hub" as a source. Follow the next section if you want to remove the news from hub news.

Demote News from Site News with Hub as Source

The Hub Site news is tied to the search index to populate the Hub news to some degree. When you demote news from a site connected to the hub using the previous method however you will notice that after waiting some time, the news will not be removed. The hub news for whatever reason doesn't reindex that item by simply changing the promoted state value. So what you need to do is just republish the page to make the page have a changed state for that index to recheck the news article and this will cause it's removal from the Hub News. To do this simple do the following. 

1. Navigate to the Page you previously changed the "Promoted State" value from 2 to 0 in the previous steps. Click on Edit. Now click on Publish to make a change to the page. 

2. Wait up to 10 minutes and refresh your page using the hub site sourced news webpart and the News article should no longer appear.

[#2]

Thanks for this guide.

Failed at step 6 - Quick edit view to change the value of Promoted State. The box is greyed out and can't be edited.

Also tried "group by" Promoted State and drag the page to a different group - fails.

Any other ways to change the value?

[#3]

Flow, but what exactly is greyed out? Make sure you save the view based off the default all items view, if you tweaked that default prior to starting these steps it could be already an issue.

2 things to check, can you do quick edit on the default view for the library? And if so, is that the view you added promoted state too, saved it either over the default or a new one, then refresh the page and quick edit should be available.

[#4]

A custom view had been set to the default, which was the one I was trying to use.

Went to the original default view which seems to be "By Author". Made it default. Followed the steps to show the Promoted State column. But the quick edit button is not visible on the "By Author" view.

Tried grouping by Promoted State column, but cannot drag pages between Promoted State groupings.

[#5]

By Author one doesn't work, needs to be the all items view. You'll have to find a view that has the quick edit button enabled, and start from that one by just adding that column and saving, then it should allow it, if not you can refresh after saving and it should allow quick edit.

[#6]

I have the same issue at step 6. When click on the "2", it grey out and cannot be changed

[#7]

Ok, tried on the All Pages view. This had been edited beforehand, so not in an "out of the box" state. Followed the steps above.

So Quick Edit is available. In Quick Edit I can edit the Name and Title properties only. The Promoted State is still greyed out.

I refreshed the page a few times, both in library view and Quick Edit view, and still not working.

[#8]

I got the same problem as @Keren Hopkins, is it possible to revert the All pages view to its default stage?

[#9]

@Deleted  It seems that It depends on site template.

The only  sites which I can modify "Promoted Status" column on are Team sites connected to O365 Groups (GROUP#0) and Communication sites(SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0), but I cannot do that on classic team site (STS#0) and team sites which is unconnected to O365 Groups (STS#3) .

[#10]

Good to know. Might have to resort to flow in those cases, if that will even let you 😉.

[#11]

@Deleted 

We can demote or unpromote news using following list view extension

https://sharepointhd.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/extensionlist-view-command-set-for-unpromotting-a-news-or-unplublish-a-news/

[#12]

@Deleted 

I also got the grey box which doesn't let me update the promoted state using the quick edit but i was able to use PnP powershell to update the Promoted state:

Set-PnPListItem -List "SitePages" -Identity <add ID of the page here> -Values @{"PromotedState" = "0"}

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/set-pnplistitem?view=sharepoint-ps

[#13]

@Ai_HIRANO I'm attempting this on a Communication Site, and I'm still unable to change it.  As everyone else has said, the Promoted State column is greyed out.

[#14]

@AngelaH Yes, I found out about it later.

Sometimes it works for communication sites, but it doesn't always seem to.
I also use PnP PowerShell to demote news pages or copy original news page and then delete it if I need it.

[#15]

This worked perfectly. Initially tried reading the promotedstate value but it didnot work. but when we try to set directly it worked. Thank you@Deleted 

[#16]

Same problem cannot demote - greyed out and read-only.  Nightmare, now it appears only option is to delete the page. 

[#17]

@MagnoliaMum 

The easiest workaround is to go back to the version closest to the time you promoted the page as a news:

Site content - Site pages - select the page to demote from News webpart - go to Version history and restore a version before promoting. You might need to re-edit the page because some of the changes between last saved and promotion might got lost. 

[#18]

Just tried this, and it worked!

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/a/290580

1. Go to the Site Pages library.
2. Click Add column.
3. Select Show/hide columns.
4. Select Promoted State.
5. Click Apply.
6. Click the Promoted State column heading.
7. Hover over Column settings.
8. Select Edit.
9. Without doing anything in the Edit column pane, click Save.
10. Select the line for a page (i.e. no need to open the page).
11. Open the information pane.
12. Under Properties, change the promoted state.
13. Republish the page or repost the news post.

Update (Nov. 2, 2022): I noticed recently that the ability to edit certain columns (e.g. Promoted State [see step 8 above] or First Published Date) has been removed on certain sites, so the instructions above may not work! When I first encountered this a couple of days ago, with the First Published Date column, I asked a Microsoft 365 specialist in my company to help me run a script in Windows PowerShell ISE as an administrator to make changes to that column. He needed to grant me access on the back end, download certain packages to PowerShell, and run a script he wrote. I tweaked his script below, so it should make changes to the Promoted State column if you follow the steps below.

1. In your Site Pages library, show the ID column.
2. Note the ID number of the page whose state you'd like to change.
3. In the script below, just change lines 1, 3, and 4:
   1. Line 1: Enter the URL of the site on which the page is stored
   2. Line 3: Enter the ID number of the page whose state you'd like to change
   3. Line 4: Enter the desired promoted state (i.e. 0 for a page, 2 for a news post)
4. Run the script.

$SiteURL = "<Insert SharePoint site URL here>"
$ListName= "Site Pages"
$NewsID = 86
$PromotedState = "0"

Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Interactive

if (-not (Get-PnPContext)) {
    Write-Host "Error connecting to SharePoint Online, unable to establish context" -foregroundcolor black -backgroundcolor Red
    return
}
else{

   Set-PnPListItem -List $ListName -Identity $NewsID -Values @{"PromotedState"=$PromotedState;}  -UpdateType SystemUpdate
    Write-Host $PromotedState
    Write-Host $NewsID
}

[#19]

GREAT ! this also worked for me to turn Promoted State from 2 (show) to 0 (hide) and removed it from the News web part !

One addition to your steps. i am on M365 & this worked for me:
10a: Once the Page detail loads, click Edit at the top right near the Publish/Republish button.
11. Click on Page Details (gear icon) to see the information pane.
12. Change the Promoted State value in the field from 2 to 0. Click another field and you should get a small "Saved" alert below the text field.
13. Refresh your News web part; the Post w/ Promoted State=0 should be hidden.

THANK YOU !

[#20]

This is no longer working for me. I'm not seeing Edit when I select Promoted State. I have to go into Grid View first for Edit to show up. Still, following these instructions (which did work for me before) is no longer allowing me to edit the Promoted State. Super frustrating.