Mainstream news sites using ping servers

I'm mulling this morning the total awareness of a news site's content on the Web. Specifically, I'm thinking of ways to get my site's stuff exposed as soon as we publish it, almost at the rate that blogs do. I admittedly don't know a lot of in-depth info about ping servers, but I'm starting to look into it.

Most major sites that have been around for a few months will get automatically indexed with Google's main search service, and legitimate, credible news sources will be conditionally included in Google News for indexing there, too. Both are quite fast. Weblogs get listed and also rely on using ping servers to update their own indexes based on changes to their content. This can sometimes give blogs a leg-up in being recognized by blog search services like Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket. With mainstream media (MSM) news sites being those whose content changes constantly, we get listed pretty fast, but can often get scooped (in terms of recognition and indexing by major crawlers) by such directories and services. I'm wondering if it might help to send XML-RPC pings to the known servers, too.

SEO is pretty much content-agnostic. Blogs and MSM sites alike get indexed and listed by the search engine community all the time. But arguably, ping servers can list content on blogs with greater frequency. That's kinda what Google News does.

Might this benefit us in the mainstream? Thoughts, anyone?