tedster - 6:33 am on Jul 3, 2008 (gmt 0)

wanderingmind, if you're not seeing a problem, it may not be a problem. You are talking about a relatively minimal menu, but a large assortment of ever changing links to fresh content. If googlebot comes by often enough and grabs all that fresh content, you're OK - it's not a "mega menu" that gets repeated throughout the site.

...like most large news websites...

I would just add, that emulating other sites, even industry leaders, is not always the best thing. I've often given in to ecommerce clients who say "but Amazon does it", only to watch Amazon STOP doing it within a few weeks or months.

You can be the business that comes up with the better idea and grab a major edge. Sometimes industry leaders have trouble shifting gears or even noticing that they have something going on that's less than optimal, shall we say.