How to Re-Publish an Old SharePoint News Item as “New”

Sometimes I need to republish or recycle an old news item so that it appears as a new item in a SharePoint site’s newsfeed. We can do this by updating the FirstPublishedDate property of the news item and then republishing the news item using Power Automate.

(1) Get the news item’s ID

In order to update the FirstPublishedDate property we will need the following information:

• the news item’s SharePoint ID
• a new date and time

In the example below the SharePoint site’s news pages which are stored in the Site Pages library of the site. To view the SharePoint ID of each news item page make sure you add the ID and First Published Date fields to your SharePoint view:

In the example flow below I will republish a news item with ID 131:

(2) Get the current date and time

I start by getting the current date and time for my local time zone. This date and time will be used to set the FirstPublishedDate but you can set this to a date and time of your choice:

If you want to set your own date and time, the date and time needs to be in the following format: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss. See: Converting time zone in Microsoft Power Automate.

(3) Set the First Published Date to the current date and time

Set the FirstPublishedDate using the Send an HTTP request to SharePoint action:

_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Site Pages')/items(<ID>)/validateUpdateListItem

{
  "formValues": [
    {
      "FieldName": "FirstPublishedDate",
      "FieldValue": "**Date/Time**"
    }
  ]
}

(4) (Re)publish the news item

Publish the news item using another Send an HTTP request to SharePoint action:

/_api/sitepages/pages(<ID>)/publish

content-type : application/json;odata-verbose
Accept: application/json;odata-verbose

Sample runtime output

The FirstPublishedDate property was updated and the news item was republished:

And news item with ID 131 was successfully (re)published:

Page View Count is not reset!

Note that the page view count for the news item is not reset and will continue to increment as the page is viewed: