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.
