How do I create an news page in SharePoint 2010 and have feature articles on the home page?

I have been tasked with creating the home page of our department's intranet page. I am a beginner admin for SharePoint and need help with the following:

My department needs a news page which will have articles written by the Managers and VP's of the various divisions of our department. They are looking for something similar to this news page: http://ift.tt/1uOQIDT. They want:

-The articles to show the publish date, author and author's email. -For employees to be able to see or be able to search all past articles -For 2 - 3 of the most recent articles (feature articles) to be displayed in a web part on our home page -For the feature article to update automatically based on the publish date.

To meet their needs, I am thinking I have to use a blog template or Publishing Site followed by a Content Query Web Part on the home page to display the feature articles. Again, I am a beginner user, so will take ANY input on how to use make this happen.