Our headline question is the topic of a thread at the NewPr Wiki.

Consensus view: yup!

My take is that blogs will have an impact, but that novel interactive news releases and other developments yet to unfold will preserve and extend the role of the news release.

They get twice as much attention, per Eyetrack III:

Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.