Basic Query: Alternatives to Group By for nText column

I am having some difficulty writing a relatively basic query. The objective is to retrieve the new stories (headlines) for the past 3 days from the database. Since each headline can be assigned multiple categories (topics) the query returns a row for every headline assignment. I can't use the 'Group By' expression because one of the columns is nText.

So basically if there is an article written yesterday, "I Love Cats" that gets assigned both topics 'CATS' and 'PETS' I only it returned with the first topic assigned... 'CATS'. Here is a little image of the three tables being called:

http://64.225.154.232/temp_dbDiagram.gif

I don't think that this query is too difficult, but I'm just getting my feet wet with writing queries that are more than select * from whatever. Any insight or recommendations are greatly appreciated.

SELECT headline.HEADLINE_ID, headline.HEADLINE_TITLE, headline.HEADLINE_DATE, headline.HEADLINE_THUMBNAIL,
topic.TOPIC_NAME, topic.TOPIC_URL
FROM tbl_CCF_Headlines headline INNER JOIN
tbl_CCF_Headlines_Topics ON headline.HEADLINE_ID = tbl_CCF_Headlines_Topics.HEADLINE_ID INNER JOIN
tbl_CCF_Topics topic ON tbl_CCF_Headlines_Topics.TOPIC_ID = topic.TOPIC_ID
WHERE (headline.HEADLINE_DATE IN
(SELECT TOP 3 HEADLINE_DATE
FROM tbl_CCF_HEADLINES
GROUP BY HEADLINE_DATE
ORDER BY HEADLINE_DATE DESC))
ORDER BY headline.HEADLINE_DATE DESCTry to cast youe text column to varchar(1000).|||What if the nText-field contains more than 1000 characters? What if it contains more than 4000 characters which I believe is the limit for nVarChar? I have this very same situation and am yet to find a solution...

-Tuukka