Help a Reporter Out

Hey, thanks for having me.

Well, Brett, let's start with Help A Reporter Out, or HARO.

It launched back in 2008, was acquired by Cision, rebranded as Connectively, and then shut down entirely in December of 2024.

What did you see in that brand at the moment it was switched off?

Okay, well, for brand managers listening, what's the lesson about the kind of authority that retains its value even when the company that owns it walks away?

Yeah, I think, you know, it's such an interesting case study thinking about the brand and the brand equity that's associated with the name and the attachment that customers have with a certain product.

I think that, like, I actually have seen a trend of this not only just help a reporter out, but, like, dig in came back.

Digg was a really popular web 2.0 tool that went away and then the original founder brought it back within the last year.

Um, I posted, um, there's this really great community within the publicist space, um, called HARO.

It stands for Help a Reporter Out.

And I basically just said that I was looking for cancer survivors to talk about their personal experience, and I had all of these people reach out to me.

Um, and you know, the parameter was basically send me a video of yourself in vertical that's about 60 seconds, and tell me how your life after cancer has been different.

Yeah, this is total side note.

I built a cloud bot that... scans my email because a hero will send hero is help a reporter out for anybody that doesn't know hero will send like four of those a day sometimes you know three or four a day and there's so many opportunities in there so I built a cloud bot that knows my brand and it goes and scans my email and it makes drafts for things that it thinks I'm a good match with and then it says do you want me to send it Kim and I like read the response I'm like that's perfect and it sends it out it's a good way to do it because we don't have time for this stuff right yeah that's such a good hack yeah I know I'm like, I'm so smart.

Yeah, that's a great time saver.

This is how people should be using AI to save time like this.

That's how I say it, so yes.

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out.

It is actually a website that people go to.

You sign up at helpareporter.com, and you are either a journalist or an expert, and journalists ask for experts to help them give advice or answer questions when they're writing a story.

Yeah.

So I would say one of the things that you could do if you were in the earlier stages of your business or, um, juggling multiple things is you can sign up for websites such as Quoted, which is Q, or HARO, which is Help a Reporter Out, H-A-R-O.

And these are free resources that anyone can sign up for, and it'll basically send you notifications for when a journalist is actively writing a story and they need a quote from an expert or a source.

So instead of you needing to figure out, you know, how do I pitch? How do I find these opportunities? How can I stay on top of this? You're getting an email in your inbox.

It hasn't all been roses.

Like, [laughs] the, the, it, it wasn't like HARO was a thriving asset and it s- suddenly got shut down.

It was a slow decay, and it was a huge decline b-

Yeah

Uh, but now you said Substacks.

Are you gonna do the same thing that you did for podcasts with Substack and Beehiiv in the newsletter industry?

Like, this is what I've been working on this week, is I put out a HARO and, and my HARO was, "What is PR in 2026?" Because it's not one thing anymore.

It is like-