This is a pretty good question and the answer can be variable depending upon the level of authority which your domain has currently accrued.
One of our employees always touts this site (not one of our clients) as having superb navigation:
There are several aspects to the navigation and URL structure - and how those different elements interact.
Even the faceted navigation impacts the URL structure, for example you can build very specific (niche) URLs like this just using the on-site UI:
So if you wanted to see driving 'experience days' for multi-car experiences (drive more than one car) within Yorkshire and Humber, which were between £100 and £250 with a 4-star or higher rating... the pages listed there would be the ones!
If you load that page, you can see that all of those things have been set in the sidebar based filtering (faceted) navigation. WordPress has issues in terms of reflecting faceted navigational choices properly in the URL structure, especially when more than faceted navigation filter is active. You then have to choose between pretty permalinks or having multiple filters accessible to users simultaneously, not ideal. Due to that I'm pretty sure some kind of bespoke (or heavily customised) CMS would have been used to get everything all working in one place as it should.
In addition to all that neat stuff, if you hover over the top menu entries you'll see that they expand and are pretty comprehensive. That's called a 'mega' menu and re-distributes SEO authority very efficiently, so long as all of the links are accessible in the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Surely this is just the way to go for everyone right?
WRONG!
The cited website obviously has the backing of Virgin and some pretty colossal promotional activity going on behind the scenes. That's not insider info, Virgin is a huge multinational corporation! Anyone examining their backlink profile using publicly available data would say the same thing.
If you're not already riding a very high SEO authority stream, chances are that this type of navigation could actually lower your ranking results.
If you have loads of authority, you can tip it down channels to really soak up a lot of long-tail traffic with this very granular type of site-architecture which leverages great navigational/URL-structure interplay.
On the other hand, if you are a smaller site (of any description) - it's like using an irrigation system with only one bucket of water to supply it. That bucket could have kept 2-3 plants alive for a few days, but spread evenly among hundreds of crops it makes literally no difference (and everything dies together, oh no!)
Implementing very advanced navigational structures too early can sometimes cause your small amount of SEO authority to 'bleed out' and achieve relatively little (or nothing) over thousands of pages.
It's great to be ambitious, and all of these great tactics can work (on any site, not just news or experience-day sites) but they all have a proper time of adoption. Adopt too early and you risk flattening your prior achievements in a void of poor results. Adopt too late and you risk being left behind as your peers take a chance and (potentially) make something more of themselves
It's not just what you do, it's when you do it (if that makes sense)
On a news site, or any other site - I'd say start simpler and as you accrue more SEO authority, redistribute it and gradually increase depth of navigation, URL structure and content granularity
Here is your basic decision:
- Flatter URL structure and condensed nav helps the site build up authority and win a few mid-to-high tier terms
- Deeper URL structure with expansive nav helps reap the long-tail and gain massive amounts of traffic, but only once your SEO authority reaches a certain threshold. Before that point, you'll just bleed out
Hope that helps