change custom post type automatically upon saving

Could really use some help. I am using a news aggregation plugin that automatically pulls news stories from various news outlets online and places them in a queue with a post_status of “pending” for me to review and select the ones I want published and visible on the site. The post_type automatically assigned to each news story when it is placed in the queue is “news”.

Long story short, the theme I am using looks for post_type = “post” to populate my widgets.

I was hoping instead of doing a lot of ugly hacking to my theme files that I could add a custom function that would upon updating the post_status from “pending” to “published”, the post_type would also change from “news” to “post”.

The only how to’s I have been able to find online is this post relating to automatically assigning categories based on post_type.

Can someone please help me??