For fifteen years, Help a Reporter Out was the default answer to "how do I get quoted in the press without hiring anyone?" Three emails a day, a few hundred journalist queries, free to sources. Then it died, and a lot of people who built their entire PR approach on it are still forwarding dead links.
Here's what happened, what exists now, and which of it is worth your morning.
What happened to HARO
HARO launched in 2008, was acquired by Vocus in 2010, and ended up inside Cision. In 2023 and 2024, Cision migrated HARO into a rebranded platform called Connectively, moved it off pure email and behind an account wall, and introduced a credit system for sources. The community reaction was not warm. In late 2024 Cision shut Connectively down entirely.
There's a twist. In April 2025, Featured.com acquired and revived the HARO name, so "HARO" exists again as a brand, but it is a different product run by a different company, not the email list people remember. Treat any pre-2025 "HARO strategy" guide as describing a service that no longer exists in that form. What survived is the format of reporters posting queries and sources answering, now spread across a handful of services and social feeds.
Worth saying plainly: HARO was always noisier than its reputation. Most queries were from content marketers building roundup posts, and a decent share of "coverage" was an unpaid link in a listicle. The replacements inherited that same distribution. Some of them are better about it than others.
The replacements, honestly compared
Source of Sources (SOS). Run by Peter Shankman, who founded HARO in the first place. It's deliberately the old thing rebuilt: email digests, free for sources, low ceremony. Query volume is meaningful and the mix skews toward real journalists more than some competitors, partly because Shankman's own network seeded it. Downside: it's a small operation, the interface is minimal, and there's no filtering or analytics to speak of. If you want the original HARO experience, this is the closest.
Qwoted. The most polished of the group and the one with the highest concentration of actual newsroom reporters, particularly in finance, fintech, crypto, insurance, and B2B tech. Free tier exists but is limited. Paid plans for sources run roughly $100–$250 a month depending on seats and features. Journalists can browse expert profiles and reach out directly, which is a real structural advantage over pure blast-and-hope. If your beat is business or finance, this is usually the first one to try.
Featured (formerly Terkel, and now the owner of the HARO brand). Question-and-answer format rather than deadline queries. You answer business questions, and the good answers get published in roundup articles across a network of business sites and sometimes get picked up by larger outlets. Free tier plus paid plans around $100+ a month for more submissions. Be clear-eyed about what this is: it's an efficient machine for producing quoted mentions and links in content-marketing articles, not a path into a staff-written feature at a major paper. That's a fine thing to want. Just don't confuse the two.
Help a B2B Writer. Free, narrow, and good at what it does. Queries come from B2B content writers and marketers, delivered by email, with far less volume than the others but much higher relevance if you sell to businesses. Almost no journalist queries in the traditional sense. Very low effort to be on it.
#JournoRequest on X and Bluesky, and Help Me B2B / JournoRequests aggregators. Reporters, especially UK and freelance ones, post queries publicly with that hashtag. It's free, immediate, and unfiltered in both directions. Bluesky in particular picked up a lot of journalist migration and the request tags there are active. The tradeoff is you have to be watching, because a public query is answered within minutes.
ResponseSource (UK) and SourceBottle (AU/NZ). Regional and long-running. If your market is the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, these often out-perform the US-centric platforms for local coverage.
Muck Rack and Prowly's inbound features. Both added query and pitch-matching features aimed at PR teams rather than individual sources. Priced for agencies. Only relevant if you're already paying for the database.
What these are actually good for
Source platforms deliver a specific, limited thing: quoted mentions and links, mostly in mid-tier business and trade content, occasionally in real news stories. They build a credible "as featured in" footprint, they produce backlinks, and they get your name in front of writers who may come back to you directly. Over time the direct relationships are worth more than the queries.
What they are not: a substitute for a news announcement, a reliable path to a Wall Street Journal feature, or something that works without consistent effort. A realistic conversion rate on a good response is roughly 5 to 15 percent, meaning 20 solid responses might produce two or three published mentions. People reporting better numbers are usually counting roundup posts.
And they answer a different question than distribution does. Source platforms get you quoted. A release gets your news on the record. Most businesses need both, at different moments.
How to actually win a query
- Speed wins more than eloquence. Many writers use the first three usable responses and stop reading. Responding within the first hour roughly doubles your odds. If you can't check queries daily, this channel isn't for you.
- Answer only what you're genuinely qualified for. The fastest way to get ignored permanently is to be the person who answers every query with vaguely-adjacent opinions. Writers remember.
- Lead with your credential in one line. "I've run payroll for a 400-person restaurant group for six years" beats "As a thought leader in HR technology."
- Write the quote, don't describe it. Give them two or three sentences they can paste verbatim, in first person, with a specific number or example. Anything that needs editing gets skipped for the response that doesn't.
- Keep it to 150 words. Under the query's stated requirements, always.
- Never attach anything unless asked, and never pitch your product. A soft plug kills an otherwise usable answer.
- Include your name, title, company, and a link at the bottom, formatted exactly how you want it to appear.
There's a fuller version of this in our guide to responding to a source request, including when to pass entirely.
Should you bother?
If you can commit 15 minutes a day, yes. Start with Source of Sources (free), add Help a B2B Writer (free) if you sell B2B, and pay for Qwoted only after you've confirmed there's real query volume in your niche. If you can't commit that time consistently, skip it. A dabbler's HARO habit produces nothing, and the hours are better spent on a press page and a short, real media list.
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