For a while now the City Room Blog on nytimes.com has had a PageRank of zero. I wonder aloud how this could be and ultimately find the answer (an incomplete PageRank update).

Old domains that have clean histories can be incredibly powerful - even if they’ve been somewhat stagnant over the years. We’re fortunate that slicksurface.com was registered in 1999 - it gives us a bit of help ranking in search engines.