It's opposite than "penalize". The first/original site is "awarded" by its publish time.
Same with single keywords. For instance, if you are among the first to promote a new keyword in this industry, like a new domain name, you will likely get some good positions for some time at Google index.
To maintain the position you need the relevance factor. Like backlinks and deeplinks. Yahoo, CNN etc. are credited with source links and that's why they get good position(s).
Many SEO "experts" tend to forget how important speed is. Just like breaking news is a sale factor, you can't duplicate publish time (google cache) and that's the "backdoor" into the algorithm. No matter how good writer and SEO "friendly" you are, you will lose attention and money if you can't "be the first" and take advantage of it into the peaks. No one can predict real world news, but there is always a time gap between knowledge and publish. In this industry, that depends on how close business relationships you have. And there are other ways, which I'm not going to post here
