HARO Permanently Closing Down on December 9th, 2024

[Ryuzaki]

Another sign of the times, the long lauded "Help A Reporter Out" service is shutting down. The end date is December 9th, 2024.

In June of 2010, HARO was acquired by Vocus, who then merged with Cision in 2014, who then rebranded HARO as Connectively in 2023.

An FAQ page has been created answering questions for users, but of course it askes "Why is Connectively shutting down?" The answer seems to be to me, and as you might also suspect, a not-so-artful dancing around the issue. Reading between these lines:

"After assessing feedback from our customers and evaluating our product portfolio, we have decided to focus our attention on core offerings where we see significant opportunities to deliver even more value to our PR & Comms professionals – namely our integrated, award-winning CisionOne platform."​

Furthermore: "CisionOne does not include features like journalist requests or media opportunities. However, CisionOne’s Outreach tool, is a powerful solution for identifying and engaging with relevant journalists and media contacts." I think a good summary is the HARO aspect is dead and they now have a database of scraped info and "guessed" email addresses. It's more akin to Ninja Outreach now.

I would blame this closure entirely on SEO's. SEO's likely became the core users as time went on, success rates likely went way down as the pitch responses became hot garbage, and then the HCU updates destroyed SEO's, leaving HARO with no users either on the advertiser side or the reporter side.

There are plenty of alternatives that are still alive out there, whether or not they're any good or are following the same path of being flooded by AI-text replies botted at impossible response speeds, I don't know. I imagine that there needs to be a meaningful monthly subscription fee to filter out a lot of that nonsense.

Times they are a-changin'...

 

[tyealia]

I recall a reporter sharing a screenshot on Twitter, where he requested responses to one of his articles. He received approximately 2,000 emails, the majority of which were from obvious AI.

I would imagine if I were a reporter it probably had gotten so bad that the platform became unusable. The links you started getting from HARO were garbage level.

 

[Hanuman]

I would blame this closure entirely on SEO's

I'd blame it on all those who thought ChatGPT generated rubbish was a scalable way to generate digital PR.

And also on the management that thinks this is an unwinnable battle. They could have explored creating user tiers where only the top reputed ones get to reach the journalist's inbox.

That may have retained the utility of the service without wearing everybody down