The press release has not gone away - just evolved to a new web2.0 friendly state. Here is a well accepted template that captures all the new capabilities.

Headline: Insert a short, compelling headline that features keywords, not buzzwords, to attract attention and legitimate interest by those who cover your space as well as potential customers.

Sub Headline: Further explain why someone should continue reading, providing a bit more clarity to the news

News Summary: List a few compelling features of what, why, and who cares...do not use buzzwords or hyperbole (and try to keep the entire release below 400 words). You can use bullets or sentences or a combination of both.

Quotes: Not every press release needs a quote, especially if the quote does not add value. Explain a significant milestone. Keep expert or customer quotes relevant to the news and how the product/service benefits customers in real world applications.

Market Facts and Relevant Links: Use del.icio.us or other social media-driven site to collect relevant facts about the company, product, competition, and state of the market and present it all through one link.

Company Info: Add a few sentences about the company, but filler, posturing language. Don't make it too long, you can always link to a corporate backgrounder or additional information.

Image/s Link: Include a link to images, and the best way to do so is to use a social media photo sharing services such as flickr or zooomr. With the correct tags you can share your photos with bloggers and reporters and customers.

RSS Link: RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites and blogposts. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website.

Technorati Tags: Technorati tracks the number of links and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging.  Technorati allows users to search by "tags" or keywords to help you identify who's talking about your areas of interest.

Bookmarks: It's important to give readers a way to save the link, using their favorite tools. The whole concept here is that you provide a means to enable social bookmarking which allows other people to find and share favorite things on the web. Also provide suggested tags (or tag beacons) to help track pickup and encourage sharing all under a common umbrella

News Sharing, Digg, NewsVine: These sites tap into the potential reach of user powered content. Every article on digg and Netscape is submitted and voted on by their communities. By placing a link to these sites in the release, users can help share, discover, bookmark, and promote your news.

Contact Info: Add contact info here. Please include relevant info, email, cell, and any IM client you may use.

Distribution:
Several wire services reach traditional media, but integrate social media optimization (SMO) and search engine optimization (SEO) elements as well to appeal to bloggers. Consider:

Marketwire (traditional, SEO - working on SMO) - Marketwire distributed the example release.

PRWeb (traditional, SMO, SEO)

PRNewswire (traditional, SEO, multimedia)

Businesswire (traditional) and the new, pseudo SMO BusinessWire (alliance with PRWeb)

Weblogwire (traditional - but only tech bloggers subscribe to this service)

PRXbuilder - (SMO specific, aligned with PRNewswire)