Have you already helped a reporter today?

If you haven’t already, it is time to subscribe to “Help A Reporter Out,” a very useful service for connecting journalists and sources. If you are already using ProfNet, a similar service from PR Newswire, subscribe anyway. Help A Reporter Out, aka HARO, has many requests that don’t make it on ProfNet, and because it is a free service, it has a lot of users and growing very quickly. I joined a few months ago, when HARO had “only” 2,000 subscribers and now it has more than 15,000.

If you have ProfNet, I would still keep it (if you have the finances), because it is still very widely used and you don’t want to miss an important request. Also, HARO seems to be getting more consumer-focused topics while ProfNet has more technology and business queries.

I’ve recently posted a request on behalf of a client on both ProfNet and HARO and I was surprised to see that I was getting twice as many responses from HARO. The quality of responses was about the same.

If you want to find out more, here is a link to a recent article about HARO and its founder Peter Shankman published in the Industry Standard: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/23/great-debate-haro-vs-prnewswires-profnet.