A way to get featuread image or first image and crop on the fly before display

In your theme’s functions.php add a call add_image_size($name, $width, $height, $crop) where $name is the name or identifier for the new size, and $crop is whether the image should cropped to fit the dimensions or just shrunk to fit within the dimensions given. This will register the new size that will be automatically created when you upload new images:

add_image_size('news-thumbnail', 500, 200, true);

Then in the template file for your news post type, call the specific thumbnail size name:

the_post_thumbnail('news-thumbnail');