I haven't sent out a traditional press release in the last 10 years . But I have placed stories about my clients in The Wall St. Journal, New York Times, ABC News, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and just about any other major media outlet on the planet. Editors surely don't need me or any other publicist to write their stories. They need me to point them in the direction of a good story, succinctly give them the facts as I see them, the sources I know and then get out of the way so they can write their own stories. I do those things by writing pitch letters, damn good ones.
Editors are busy.
Not if you wanted your friend to keep listening. Be equally kind to journalists. A journalist friend who told me he gets a three foot stack of snail mail and over 150 e-mails a day shared this story with me the other day. There were about 8 more pages, but I didn't bother to read them. I just laughed, showed the letter around and threw it away.