We spend a lot of time, we media folk, debating what our evolving readership wants us to give them online: Rich content or lean? Structure or flexibility? Depth or speed? Sizzle or steak?
We might consider using our own behavior as an indicator. Judging by the reaction of media folk to the year-old source-finding service Help A Reporter Out (known to fans and detractors alike as HARO), the answers are: lean, flexible,fast and both, please.
HARO is the creation and personal project of Peter Shankman: marketer (founder of The Geek Factory Inc.), author (of Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work, And Why Your Company Needs Them), blogger, stuntmonger (he once got himself Tasered in public), and always-on social media networker with addresses on Twitter, AIM, Skype, Facebook and ICQ.
About a year ago, Shankman started putting his social-media savvy to work on behalf of journalist acquaintances who kept asking him for source recommendations. He started a Facebook group, open to anyone, called If I Can Help A Reporter Out, I Will. (Disclosure: I’m not acquainted with Shankman, but I heard about the group and joined.) The idea got attention almost immediately from media blogs Gawker, and MediaBistro. Within three months his Facebook group hit that site’s 1,200-member group cap.
In March, Shankman migrated the group to a thrice daily e-mail newsletter that he assembles based on queries that come through a form on his site. By his own account — and as far as I know there’s no other way to audit the claim — his subscribers now number close to 40,000.
What’s HARO’s appeal?
- It’s free, on both sides of the equation: to journalists looking for sources and also to the subscribers who hope to become sources.
- It’s open to all comers. HARO’s motto is “Everyone’s an Expert at Something.”
- It’s fast. Several months ago, I posted a query to the list looking for sources for a lengthy magazine story. About three hours after I posted — and about 15 minutes after Shankman’s most recent e-mail compilation went out — my inbox exploded. I got about 25 replies from the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Almost all were on-topic and half were worth calling back. (I can’t link to that story because it won’t be published until February.)
The rise of HARO apparently is viewed in the marketing world as a loss for ProfNet, the dominant source-finding service, which is owned by PRNewswire. ProfNet, which charges for subscriptions, says it has about 14,000 subscribers in PR agencies, university and corporate news offices, publishers and other professional public-affairs shops. What looks like a market battle between the two has been explored by Adweek and the blogs PRNewser and PhilGomes.com, which is written by a vice-president at Edelman Digital. (Myself, I use both. ProfNet, which is also free to reporters, delivers good expert sources. HARO is definitely better for reaching “real people.”)
What’s especially interesting, though, is the affection that HARO users have for Shankman, and the speed with which a community has grown up around him. (See for instance this blog post by reporter-turned-marketer Ann Handley and the comment string on this Industry Standard profile.)
I think Shankman has so many fans because he is:
- Transparent: Anyone can subscribe to HARO, so there’s no black-box mystery. Reporters who need to make anonymous source requests can have their identities cloaked — but all subscribers can read all queries.
- Personal: Every HARO e-mail starts with a short note, about 200 words, about Shankman’s day, Shankman’s “big-boned” cats NASA and Karma, and Shankman’s indefatigable assistant Meagan.
- Always on: At least a couple of times between the thrice-daily emails, Shankman tweets urgent requests for reporters on deadline (such as this tweet on behalf of the Denver Post — which was followed exactly 30 minutes later by this tweet reporting that a source had been found.)
- Constantly improving: See this admiring post dissecting a PR pitch that delivered exactly what a reporter needed, and this account of a speech predicting that social media makes press releases obsolete.
So, summing up, here’s what journalists are gravitating to: a service that is lean, honest, fast, flexible, community-focused but curated, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. If that’s what we want, shouldn’t we assume that’s what our readers want too?
