Mrton, this is not FUD, this is fact, and I speak from experience rather than conjecture.

When a release goes out on the wire, there are a multitude of sites that will pick it up automatically from the wire. On the order of thousands, including Yahoo! News, Google News, simultaneously That being said, if your press release contains a link to your site or other relevant keywords in conjunction with your site or product name, you WILL get a siginificant boost (aka, jumpstart) in your rankings immediately.

In addition to that, if a particular publication finds significant interest in your business, product, or service, they will call you for a more in depth interview, or op ed piece, or in some cases, a full feature. It depends on the relevance and interest level of the publication.

I don't claim this to be a panacea, and ultimately the effect has a very short halflife, but traditional press releases can be used very effectively in conjunction with non traditional PR. They both have their place.

A dollar spent on blogging is worth 10 dollars spent on SEO, if our Google stats are predictive. Got $1000 to burn? Hire an intern (BTW: interns --- a best-kept-secret) and have them write blog posts for you.