WonderLaura @iwmentor – Laura Rogers

The SharePoint News web part just got some exciting updates, and this post and video contains a full deep dive — not just what’s new, but into everything this web part can do. Because honestly, once you understand the News web part well, it becomes one of the most powerful communication tools in your entire Microsoft 365 toolkit.

What Is the SharePoint News Web Part?

News posts in SharePoint are actually just pages. Every news post you create lives in your site’s Site Pages library, right alongside your regular SharePoint pages. The difference is that a news post has a “promoted” state, which is what the News web part looks for when it decides what to display.

So why use the News web part instead of just linking to pages directly? Because it gives your audience a dynamic, visual, automatically-updating feed of all your latest content. Think about everything you currently send out as email newsletters. The News web part can be a replacement for that — and here’s the bonus: after you publish a news post, SharePoint immediately prompts you to send it out as an email digest too. So you’re not choosing between email and SharePoint. You get both.

You can also surface news as a tab in Microsoft Teams. Wherever your people are working, news can meet them there.

What’s New in 2026

The Filmstrip Layout

What’s the latest update? the Filmstrip layout.

This is a brand-new layout option for the News web part, and it’s a step up from the existing Carousel layout. Here’s the key difference: in the Carousel, all the cards stay at a fixed size and you click back and next to move through them. In the Filmstrip, the cards dynamically resize as they animate through your news items. It’s got motion and scale — it looks at the images in your news and scales itself accordingly.

This is something you’d want to place prominently on your homepage. Here are a few things to know about configuring the Filmstrip:

• You can decide how many posts show in the rotation.
• You can set a timer to control how many seconds it displays each card before moving on
• It animates continuously as long as the page is open — it’s not just a static display

Also New: Multi-Site News Expands to GCC

The second major update is that multi-site news aggregation is now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD environments. This feature already existed in commercial tenants — where editors can select multiple SharePoint sites as a single news source, rolling up posts into one view — but it’s now extended to government cloud customers.

Understanding News Sources

When you add a News web part to a page, the first thing to configure is your source — where is the news coming from? You have a few options:

This site — Shows news posts from the current SharePoint site only.

Select sites — You pick specific sites to aggregate from. Great for intranet homepages that need to pull from HR, IT, and Communications all in one place.

Recommended for current user — This one’s dynamic. SharePoint looks at which sites the logged-in user frequents and serves up relevant news automatically. Two people on the same team might see different results here, because it’s personalized.

You can also put multiple News web parts on the same page, each pulling from different sources or filtered differently. For example, one web part titled “Corporate Announcements” pulling from your communications hub, and another titled “Department Updates” pulling from team sites. You’re not limited to one.

The Six Layout Options

Once you’ve set your source, pick your layout. Here’s a quick rundown of all six:

1. Top Story — One large featured item at the top with additional posts below. Has a compact option.
2. List — Shows news items stacked in a simple list down the page.
3. Side by Side — A two-column look, almost like buttons.
4. Hub News — Designed for hub site rollups.
5. Carousel — The classic rotating card display with back/next navigation.
6. Filmstrip (new!) — The dynamic, animated layout we talked about above.

Each layout has its own set of settings — things like showing or hiding the author name, first published date, number of views, and whether to hide the entire web part when there are no results to show.

Filtering Your News

This is where things get really powerful. After you set your source and layout, you can filter to control exactly which news posts appear. Your filter options include:

• Title includes the words — Great for simple keyword-based filtering
• Recently added — Show only news from the past week, month, year, etc.
• Recently changed
• Created by / Modified by — Even has a “current user” option (though I’ll be honest, showing people only their own news is a bit of a niche use case!)
• Page properties — This one’s the powerful one

And here’s an important point about how permissions work with this: even if you aggregate news from dozens of sites, each person only sees content they have permission to. It works the same way as search and the Highlighted Content web part — SharePoint handles the permissions trimming automatically. This is why site ownership and permissions management matters so much. The right people need access to the right sites, for SharePoint to work the way you intend.

Using Page Properties to Filter (and Why It Matters)

Here’s a scenario I walked through in the below video. Let’s say you want to set up your SharePoint intranet homepage with multiple News web parts — one for each of 3 different categories of news.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to your Site Pages library and add a new column — let’s call it Power Hour Category — as a Choice column with your categories.
2. Edit each news page.
3. go to Page Details, and assign the appropriate category.
4. Back on your homepage, add a News web part and use the filter Page Properties → Power Hour Category = CATEGORY NAME.
5. Add a second News web part and filter for another specific CATEGORY NAME.
6. Add a third for another category, or more if you’d like.

Now you’ve got a beautifully organized homepage with separate, automatically-updating feeds for each category — no developer required.

One important catch: the Page Properties filter option only appears when your news source is set to This site. If you’re aggregating from multiple sites, you won’t see it. For multi-site filtering by metadata, you’d need to set up managed properties — that’s a more advanced topic, and honestly, it’s quite a pain to configure. For most scenarios, keeping the metadata and filtering within a single site is the simpler and more practical approach.

You can also make your metadata columns required, which forces content authors to fill in the category before they can publish a page. That’s a great governance move if you want consistent tagging across your news library.

Organizing Your News

One more feature worth knowing about: you can manually organize the order of your news posts within the web part. There’s an “Organize” option in the properties panel that lets you drag items into a specific order.

In practice, most teams don’t use this because news is so dynamic that it’s constantly changing. But if you have specific pinned announcements you always want at the top, it’s there for you.

What Would You Use The News Web Part For?

Here are some of the best real-world use cases for the News web part I see in organizations:

• Leadership messages from the CEO or executive team
• Safety and compliance alerts
• Product or project launch announcements
• Department updates filtered by team or category
• Routine company newsletters — published once in SharePoint, distributed via email digest

If you want to take this even further, check out IW Mentor’s SharePoint training at iwmentor.com. There’s a full course on site design and web parts that goes way deeper than a one-hour Power Hour can — we’re talking three hours of focused training on exactly this kind of content.

FAQ

Resources

Microsoft's official documentation on the news web part

What are you using the SharePoint News web part for in your organization? Are you doing anything creative with filtering or metadata? Drop a comment below — I'd love to hear what you're building! Here's my full step-by-step video: