This is something that’s happened to me in multiple tenants recently. When I delete a News Post which I’ve created in a Hub Site, the post never goes away in the News Web Part. It always seems to be a post we’ve created as some sort of point-proving demo, too. You know, with a title like: “This would be a really helpful news post” or “Be sure to delete me.”

Was there a trick was missing? I’ve tried reindexing, emptying the recycle bin, everything I could think of, but no joy.

The light finally came on when I posted to #SPHelp on Twitter and got this response from my pal Sharon Weaver (@shareoneweaver).

I solved this problem by changing the promoted state to 0. Show promoted state field in view, edit and save it with no changes, and then change the value from 2 to 0. Voila. Then just hide the field again. Need to make a blog post but haven’t had a chance.

— Sharon Weaver (@sharoneweaver) March 22, 2022

When PromotedState is 2, the page is a News Post. When it’s 0, the page is just a page. So, in effect, you want to remove the “newsiness” from the page. Then you can get rid of it with impunity.

Thing is, you can’t edit PromotedState through the UI anymore. But I had a solution!

No surprise, but ShareGate to the rescue. I exported the metadata for the page, edited PromotedState value from 2 to 0 in Excel, imported the change to PromotedState, manually kicked off a reindex of the library – and the pesky News Post is gone from the News Web Part!

Not trivial, but it worked. It’s a bug.