Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you have the same content in the press release as you put out there for the news sites, then it's a duplicate content issue.  Rarely does Google penalize sites for duplicate content (especially when it's just one page), they usually just choose one version and list that and then drop the others from the listings so they don't have a hundred results with the same content.  My guess is Google is choosing to list the news sites over your client's site. How authoritative is your client's site?  Did you use a canonical tag?

A couple more for you: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-editorial-calendar/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/04/17/editorial-calendar/

Where are the 30 visits a day coming from? Also make a sitemap and submit and if the old site had a bunch of pages that do not exist then I would 301 all that you are aware of. But also if its a new site why not a domain that is actually branded to you and your company and not some dropped thing?