The art of writing a good media release

 
Okay, the title to this post is a little misleading.  'The art of…' – well, let's just say that creativity is not encouraged when writing a media release.  
For a start you need to:

be factual
sound objective
pull back on the adjectives

Writing style
In short, you need to write like the journalist you are sending the release to. [...]

Choosing between advertising or journalists

 
There's a lot of people out there at the moment saying 'Don't waste your money on advertising'. The grand alternative offered tends to be three-fold: 

online marketing
(blog posts, directory listings, keyword optimisation, social marketing like Twitter, etc.)
 
affiliate marketing
(partnering in some way with another business who has a mailing list that matches your target [...]