HARO, Help A Reporter Out, was acquired by Vocus in 2010. A few years later Vocus merged with Cision.
It has been managed by Cision since then.
For a long time it was a great way to get your brand in front of real journalists and website owners, and potentially be featured in one of their upcoming articles, often with a link back to your site.
It grew in popularity and that certainly made it more challenging to have your pitches read by journalists, much less used by them.
Those challenges grew exponentially with the release of ChatGPT and lazy marketers flooding the journalist inquiries with automated AI responses.
Something had to change, and it did.
At the end of last year, Cision rebranded HARO as Connectively and turned it into a mostly paid platform. You can still submit 10 pitches a month for free. It’s easy to burn through those.
While I think a paid solution is the right path for a tool like this to cutdown on the flood of AI spam, as I said in last week’s note, alternatives to Connectively, I think Connectively’s paid tiers suck.
Apparently, the original creator of HARO, Peter Shankman, thinks so too.
In the past week, he launched HERO, Help Every Reporter Out.
HERO returns to the roots of HARO in trying to be a free resource to connect journalists with sources.
That’s right. It is completely free to sign up for and use.
I would say the big advantage it offers right now is it is just growing.
That means you may have an easier time having pitches accepted because you are not competing against as many people as you would have been in the free days of HARO. A big fish in a small pond, so to speak.
I’m not sure how they are going to keep the AI spammers out without a paywall in place, or if they will even try to. It likely will inevitably be overrun by the same sort of lazy marketers that infested HARO.
For now though, it could be a good resource for some quality links.
