The USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences has a very nicely designed template with primary top navigation; and standard dropdown menus for second-tier navigation. The second-tier and deeper navigation is displayed on the left menu, but subsection navigation (menu trails) are also highlighted in red to help indicate which section you are—makes it easy to recognize.
USC's News & Events section is nicely arranged with thumbnails, videos, teasers and dates. News item shows a feature at top with larger thumbnail, and lists below with thumbnail.
Virginia Tech also has a very nice left-navigation menu with professional looking, as shows on their University Relations department page.
The Event Calendar is very nicely placed in rightmost column without taking up too much screen space—yet you can click on a date in the mini-calendar, and it loads that day's events below it without reloading the page. When you click on a calendar event, there is a webcal: link to add the event to your personal calendar, plus links to social media (Digg, Facebook, Reddit, and Stumbleupon). The webcal feature is really nice. Every page has an email and print-ready link (which open in a lightbox). (Caution: dropdown links and print-friendly/email should really work with JavaScript off.)
The News articles are tagged by category and free-tags. This means you can click on any tag to see a list of any other articles tagged by the same term. They also feature Top Stories on the right. I wonder what makes them top stories? Number or readers, or author's decision? They also put single large images or even videos in the story. All stories can be browsed via the archives which are sorted by month.
USC also has "In the news" which is short clips where their school is named or somehow involved. Listings are chronological and can browse through the archives. Each item begins with a hyperlink to the referring article—very consistent.
The way this website is constructed and how the CMS taxonomy is implemented, this would be a good model for structuring our news site, as taxonomy and cross-linking has the potential to become fairly complex. This navigation seems fairly natural.
