Another suggestion for a future version, I haven't found any way to do this with the current CuteNews:

Two avatars per story - a smaller one for the short story, another for the full story, so that one can see a "Active stories" page with thumbnails and, when reading more, the complete story with the big picture.

It would mean having a {avatar-small} and {avatar-big} for a story, instead of just {avatar}. Can this be done?

I know I can manually code pictures into the short or full story but that's way beyond the technical capabilities of people who will use this script on the site I work on. And the whole point of installing CuteNews was to allow others to post news, before I go totally nuts.