if I run a site on widgets, can I display any press releases related to that, or do i need permission of the owner? Since it is a press "release" I assume that they WANT the story "out there" Could there be legal ramifications of posting press releases on your site?
The Press Release sites would love for you to take one of their press releases and repost it to your quality site. As mentioned, you can snag a feed too.
With all due deference to MarketJunction, you can and should alter the press release if you want to. In fact, if you pretend to be real news organization, you really pretty much need to rewrite the press release so that you have some semblance of journalistic professionalism. You can even call people up, and add quotations to the story from the people you talk to. You can even, as you dig into it, decide that the press release has the totally wrong slant on things, and write an article refuting it, using bits and pieces from the press release as it suits your article. That's how PR works. They send you the release, and you are allowed, and expected, to alter it to fit your needs. The New York Times, for example, gets press releases every single day, and publishes stories based on lots of them, but I bet very few if any go in the paper as written by the PR firm. You can distinguish that from article distributions, where somebody in search of links has written an article with their signature box at the bottom, and with a copyright notice. That's a different ball game, and those articles are intended to be taken as is. They are not PR, and should not be on PR sites.
You are right Ray. In fact, just yesterday I was writing a police story from a LV Metro release and used what I needed. I said what I did because I didn't want to confuse people and I wasn't in the mood to type a long response. I was trying to keep it very simple.