eworld,

You state that you have "quite a bit of excellent content articles at my disposal," which does beg a question regarding duplicate content. Are these articles anywhere else on the web? If not, and you are asking from the point of view of is there a penalty for adding lots of content, I am not aware of any.

At the same time if it is content that can be added over time and will help with QDF (query deserves freshness), Cyrus Shepard has an excellent post on SEOmoz blog. To quote a portion of it,** Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score** than sites that add content less frequently.

Cyrus further adds that one needs to be careful not to ignore content on older pages.

I do not think by this he means that putting up 1000 new pages in a week will rocket you to stardom on the Internet, but I do think if your content is fresh and not currently on the web, you could have a real opportunity with this portion of the algorithm.

Best

It won't matter if the are on the same C block, IP, etc. if they are all registered to the same owner. Today Google even looks at ownership. The issue with doing as you suggest is that you will likely be found out and, even if not penalized, I would think your links won't be allowed to help you. 
There are two possible ways to go where you could add value to each:
1. As suggested by David, combine some of the sites where possible. Be careful with this and slow if you go this direction. Make sure you 301 redirect from URL on site A to similar on site B. For any one site, do not combine more than one other over 4 to 6 weeks. I would not combine more than about three sites to one. If some of the sites are low value, just get rid of them.

2. Where reciprocal links are not of value, you might be able to offer a link from Site G for a link to Site F, etc. Again, I would suggest being methodical and not over doing it.

Best of luck

I would do either. Also, Sha makes good points around press releases and what they are for. Unfortunately, with most of the PR sites, what ends up happening is they try to stuff it with the name of the company over and over and they overuse old stale info so that a release around the site can be made. (I see this a ton with attorney sites: The John Doe Law Firm states that often when it rains there are clouds in the sky!....John Doe is here for you in the event of a flood caused by that cloudy rain.)

To me, they should have never released it if that is the approach. But, that is simply my opinion. A new product or an update, actual news around a flood and something newsworthy about the company, etc. are all reasons to do a press release. Make sure it is newsworthy in some way to who you target.

Echo1

I would approach it this way. If you are releasing them as articles and press releases, I would have them as a blog for the articles and not as a part of the content (assuming you already have pages devoted to these keywords) so you do not split the power of a given keyword term. With the press releases, if you have an "In the Press" type page, you could put them there and, yes, use internal links.

I would make sure that all have links back to the appropriate keywords (good anchor text, etc) on pages for all. This will insure if someone posts them, that your links are most likely to be there and come back to you.

A caution is that with press releases, if you are using a company that does that, be sure they are not already hit with Panda issues. I read that the Berkshire Hathaway site with "Patented SEO" was hit by Panda and lost some of its ranking.

Best

Laurie,

I agree with Inhouseninja and would add this: When you buy the domain, try to purchase it so that it is under a different name, on a different server. Minimally, have it on a different C-block. I am not sure how much from a percentage point of view it can effect link evaluation, but we know that it does. 
So, if both of the new domains are on the same server, owned by the same entity, you will not get near the weight from the search engines (if any).

I do this in a couple of verticals but we the sites are actually fully related, have contact forms and other mechanisms for customer contact, etc. These sites are about 5 pages (not sure that any more would improve our lot) and we are able to use them for linking to the main site. If our main site did not exist, these would be real functioning sites that could be affiliate sites, etc.

Best,