Help A Reporter Out

There’s a terrific website called Help a Reporter Out, otherwise known as HARO. The tagline is “everyone’s an expert at something.”  Publicizing peoples’ expertise is one of the ways that my agency has helped clients to obtain PR coverage over the years so we follow the media leads provided by HARO and pitch when there’s a good fit.

A work-obsessed triathlete named Peter Shankman started this site as a service to connect people like me who do PR with journalists who need information to write their stories. You can go to http://www.helpareporter.comand sign up to receive daily e-mails with tips on what reporters are looking for in terms of contacts and information.  There’s a whole comunity of HARO PR people and journalists now who are tied together by this site which also has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The whole concept reinforces to me how PR has gone social in the past several years, and how we as PR people must stay connected to what’s happening in these online communities to find leads on stories and find the right people to pitch our stories to.

Recently Peter Shankman sold his website to Vocus, an online company that provides an array of services to PR people. Shankman became a VP of Vocus as part of the sale. I’d like to congratulate Peter for his hard work. The sale price on his site was not disclosed but I hope he made out handsomely. He deserves it. He had a great idea for a website and he pursued it with dogged determination. I admire his entrepreneurialism and his extreme focus on creating a successful online venture.