[SPO] Can users choose sources for news?

[kenneho]

Hi.

We'd like our users to be able to choose sources for news and event themselves. We're going to use audience targeting, so that news publishers can target groups of people, but as the news publishers likely historically speaking doesn't always target the correct users (i.e. audience), we'd like our users themselves to be able to "fill in the gaps" so to speak, in that they can manually add more news sources.

As an admin, I can edit the news web part and pick news sources for all users, but is there a way for regular non-admin users to pick news sources themselves? For example, is there a way for user A to manually pick news from site X to show up in her news widget?

The same goes for events and calendars - if our users could add sources for these as well that would be great. 

[#2]

@kenneho 

That type of personalisation doesn't exist I am afraid, not out the box anyway in Modern SharePoint. I haven't looked if there are any coded solutions but I have done this on projects in the past in classic SharePoint. 

[#3]

@Andrew Hodges, thanks for your input. So if I understand correctly, you've created custom solutions for this in the past, for SharePoint Classic sites? 

[#4]

@kenneho 

Yes, the way you would do it is have a list of all the news settings a user can choose. 

When the webpart is shown to the user it checks the list and if that user exists it loads the values and filters the news. If the user doesn't exist they are given the option to choose news categories. 

You may still be able to use fields against each users profile in SharePoint instead of a separate list but not technically competent enough to say that currently works, that's what I have Devs for.