Are the old rules on when to issue a press release still valid?

I was fortunate not to have been adversely affected by the great storm that hit our region this week. I lost power for less than 24 hours and was able to get back to business on Wednesday.

With a client's media announcement slated to be emailed out to the local media on Wednesday, I held off doing so figuring it would get lost in the continued news coverage of the storm's aftermath. It is about an event taking place later this month and this initial document is just a save-the-date type of announcement with more details to follow in a press release later this month.

I certainly didn't want to be insensitive and be THAT PR person who sends out a press release during a natural disaster about something not even remotely related to the disaster. I saw a local broadcast journalist nicely bash a local PR person on Twitter (not by name) for doing just that during Hurricane Sandy this week and vowed that that would not be me! But with next Tuesday being Election Day, the prospect of waiting until Monday to send  it out was further complicated.

So I contemplated sending out the release today, a Friday, which we were taught in college was a no-no. The belief was that press releases sent to the media on Friday get ignored and sent into a void. Mondays aren't great either since there's a lot of catching up to do at the beginning of a week and your release would get ignored, or so we thought.

That got me thinking if the timing for issuing press releases that I was taught in the early 1990s when I was in college was still valid today in this 24/7 world of news and reporting. Does it really matter when the release is issued? Perhaps weekends are still a bad idea due to limited staff, but what about weekdays? Can any day of the week be just as effective as another? Or should we still stick with the old rule of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays being best? What do you think?