developing a magazine/newspaper theme

Hi all Im in need of a little help developing my new theme. Basicly Im wanting to dev a magazine/newspaper theme for my site tory-politico.com what Im trying to acheive is something a long the lines of what politico.com does on its homepage with a large section at the top to highlight a feature post then other posts listed bellow that. From that I tell politico.com do not use wordpress, but can the same effect be acheived with WP. Idealy I would like to list the post below the feature post without dividing them into categories.

I would also like to have the option to generate a thumbnail on the hopepage for stories.

I’ve looked at several magazine themes but none of them do what I want so can anyone help me in this task that would be great.