[especkman]

Have you had any content up on the domain before this?

Google tries to get news items into the index quickly, but that doesn't mean they are doing it from newly discovered sites. Part of the reason they crawl sites frequently is that the site has new content every time the crawler visits. I'm sure it also doesn't help if the site has something other than a baseline pagerank.

Also keep in mind that at some point in the past year or two, Google appeared to give better pagerank to sites on domains whose registration was paid up more than a year in advance.