Custom news module - image from post?

[Louis7777]

I am planning to follow the guide and create a module extension for personal use.

So I want to clone the news module in order to give it my own look and feel. It has everything I need (date, author, excerpt, number of comments, views etc.) except for one thing... a featured image (pick the first one from a post?).

Thing is, it's almost 2016 and no one finds attractive just a title and some text from the post. Images are very important.

So I'd like to ask if you could possibly add that feature (to pull and display an image from the post) or show me how it's done or at least show me where to start if I want to code it myself.