HARO, a vital tool for press releases, is shutting down

It’s the end of an era.

The service formerly known as Help A Reporter Out is shutting down after a 16-year run that included an acquisition, a merger, a rebranding (to Connectively), and a mailing list that at one point had over 800,000 sources and 55,000 journalists.

How HARO worked

Founded in 2008 by Peter Shankman, HARO, as it was affectionately known, operated under a very simple business model:

• Journalists would post queries,

• sources would respond with a pitch, and

• if the journalist used the pitch, they would be quoted (most of the time, receiving a backlink).

It was a beautiful system, and for many years it was the best way for indie hackers to land high-quality backlinks from esteemed publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

The downturn

However, things took a turn for the worse in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. Suddenly, journalists were overwhelmed with an endless horde of AI spam, worsening the service for both the journalists and genuine sources. Then, in 2024, parent company Cision rebranded the service to Connectively, ditching the email newsletter for a new dashboard and adding a paid tier in the process.

The move itself was sloppy. A lack of communication over the name change and a lengthy transition process in which many of the core users churned opened up the coffin. The failure of the pay-to-pitch model to curb the AI spam put the nail in it. 

As PR expert Sacha Fournier explains, “The worsening conversion rate, combined with the fact you had to pay to pitch, was giving the platform a bad reputation.”

Ultimately, HARO was done in by Cision being “a dinosaur that moves way too slowly,” as former HARO agency owner Elvis Sun put it.As a result, it will be put to rest for good on December 9th.

Alternative services

Thankfully, there are alternatives available:

• Elvis is building PressPulse.

• Sacha is building JournoFinder.

• HARO founder Peter Shankman is building Source of Sources, a 2x/day email that operates much like HARO used to.

So, even though HARO is dead, the business model it pionereed lives on.