[TYPO3-ttnews] Best practice for headline news?

[Frank]

Hi,

I want to make a news homepage with 5 selected news items and 1 most 
important (headline) item on top and with its own style. I've read in this 
group that I can put two tt_news plugins on the page. For the headline item: 
a LATEST selection, limited to 1 item. For the 5 selected items a LIST or 
LATEST, limited to 5 items. Each plugin its own css and template and so on.

But how to select the news items? Let's say I have already 500 items. Today 
I enter 10 new items. There is 1 that I want to make headliner. I could give 
it a special category 'headliner'. And do this each day. With a LATEST 
selection the newest headliner would come out. But if I want to make the 
previous headliner item today's number one, for whatever reason? Then I have 
a problem. In fact there should always only be one headliner item, ie the 
one that I choose.
Does anyone have an idea how I could realise this?

And the same thing for the 5 selected items on the homepage. I've introduced 
10 new items. It's not just the 5 last ones (chronologically) that are my 
choice for the homepage. No, I pick them out. How to do this?

Fot both problems the StartId options doesn't seem usefull, because the 
number of items and also number of id 's keeps growing?

And then, while thinking of picking items out in the back-end. How will this 
back-end (list view) look if I have 500 items. Will it be just a very long 
list / page? How to find back an item?

Thanx in advance for the advice!
Frank