Is it worth answering reporter queries in 2026, now that the service everybody built the habit around no longer exists?
Short answer: yes, and the collapse of the original platform made it more worthwhile, not less, because the volume of low-effort responses dropped along with it. The longer answer requires getting the facts straight first, because a lot of advice still circulating describes a service that has not accepted a submission since 2024.
Help a Reporter Out was launched by Peter Shankman in 2008, sold to Vocus in 2010, and came under Cision when Cision acquired Vocus in 2014. In 2024, Cision rebranded HARO as Connectively. Later that same year, Connectively shut down. The brand name persists in the industry the way Kleenex persists, and when a marketer says they are going to respond to a HARO query, everyone knows what they mean. What they mean is the model, not the mailing list: reporters post what they need, sources answer, and quotes get placed. That model is alive and running across half a dozen platforms.
Is HARO still a thing?
As a product, no. As a practice, very much yes, and the practice got healthier when the biggest pipe closed.
Here is why. By its final years, HARO’s core problem was volume on the source side. A reporter posting a query about small business lending could receive two hundred replies within a day, most of them generic, many of them clearly machine-written, a large share of them from people with no connection to lending at all. Reporters started treating the inbox as a cost. Some quietly stopped posting.
When the platform closed, that pipeline fragmented across smaller services, and fragmentation did something useful: it raised the effort floor. Answering queries now means monitoring two or three sources rather than one email digest, which filters out the people who were only participating because it required nothing. Reporters on the surviving platforms report smaller response volumes, which means your reply has a materially better chance of being read by a human.
The other thing that changed is the mix of who posts. The original service skewed toward general-interest outlets and content marketers wearing journalist hats. The current market has a heavier concentration of trade press, newsletter writers, and staff reporters at business publications, which is a better audience if you sell to businesses.
Where reporter queries live now
There is no single successor, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a subscription.
Source of Sources, run by Peter Shankman, is the closest thing to a spiritual continuation and follows the original email digest pattern. Qwoted operates as a two-sided platform where reporters post requests and sources build profiles, with a heavier lean toward finance, tech, and B2B. Featured runs a question-and-answer model where experts submit written responses that get published across partner sites. Help a B2B Writer focuses on software, marketing, and business operations topics. ResponseSource covers the UK market and has done so far longer than HARO existed.
Outside the platforms, a meaningful share of queries never touch a service at all. Journalists post requests directly on X and on Bluesky using request hashtags, in industry Slack communities, in newsletter footers, and in LinkedIn posts. Some publications maintain standing callouts on their own sites. Trade associations circulate reporter requests to members. If you work in a specific vertical, the association mailing list is often the highest-quality query source available to you and nobody in your category is watching it.
Pick two platforms plus one direct channel. More than that and you will burn your monitoring budget on triage instead of writing. Fewer and you will not see enough volume to find the queries you are genuinely qualified for.
What does a reporter do with your reply?
Understanding this is the whole game, and almost nobody who sits down to respond to a HARO query thinks about it for even a second.
The reporter is not evaluating you. They are writing a piece that is already partly drafted, with a shape in their head and a paragraph that needs a human voice in it. They have a deadline that is closer than you think, an editor who will ask where the quote came from, and a house style that requires attribution formatted a specific way. Your reply is either raw material for that paragraph or it is a chore.
They open your email in a triage pass, usually on a phone, usually while doing something else. They are scanning for a sentence they can use. If they find one, they scan up for your name, title, and company, and they scan down for anything that would make the quote risky, like an unverifiable claim or a sales pitch. That whole pass takes seconds.
Then comes the part that decides everything: they either copy a chunk of your text into the draft, or they do not. If they have to rewrite your paragraph to make it usable, they will usually just move to the next reply, because there are twelve more and one of them will not need rewriting.
I call this the Paste Test, and it is the only quality bar that matters. Can the reporter select a block of your reply, paste it into a draft, wrap it in quotation marks with an attribution line, and ship it with no edits? If the answer is no, your reply does not exist, no matter how smart it is.
The three-block reply
Everything follows from the Paste Test. Structure your reply in three blocks, in this order, and keep them visually distinct so a phone scan finds them.
The attribution block goes first and takes one line. Full name, exact title, company name, and the URL you want associated with you. Format it the way a publication would print it: Dana Reyes, Director of Underwriting, Northgate Insurance. Not “I’m Dana and I run underwriting stuff at Northgate.” Reporters have been burned by titles that turned out to be inflated, so give them the one that appears on your LinkedIn and your company site, identically. If those two do not match, fix that before you answer another query.
The quote block is the body, and it is where the Paste Test gets applied. Write two to four sentences in first person, in complete thoughts, using words you would say out loud. No bullet points, because a reporter cannot paste a bulleted list into a paragraph. No headers. No bolding key phrases, which reads as though you are directing their editing. If you want to give them options, write two separate short quote blocks with a blank line between, and let them choose. Each block should stand alone without the query for context, because by the time it lands in the draft, the context is gone.
The proof block closes it and takes two or three lines. This is where you put the thing that makes your quote checkable: a number from your own operations with the time period attached, a named client who has agreed to be referenced, a public dataset you are drawing on, a credential that is relevant to this specific question. Offer one follow-up path, a phone number or a fifteen-minute window, and stop. Do not attach a media kit. Do not append your company boilerplate. Do not ask them to link to you, which is the single fastest way to get deleted, because it tells them you are optimizing for something other than their story.
Total length: under two hundred words. The reply that gets used is almost always shorter than the ones that do not.
How fast do you actually have to be?
Faster than tomorrow, and the rest of the speed advice is overstated.
The real deadline structure works like this. Most queries carry a stated deadline that is roughly the reporter’s internal deadline minus a buffer. Reporters begin assembling the piece well before that date, and the sources who land are usually the ones who arrived while the draft was still being shaped rather than after it had been filled. In practice that means the useful window is the first day, not the first hour.
Where speed genuinely matters is breaking news. If a regulator announces something at nine in the morning and a reporter posts a query at nine fifteen looking for someone to explain what it means, the window is measured in minutes, and the person who wins is the one who already had a point of view and did not need to construct one. That is not a speed advantage. It is a preparation advantage wearing a speed costume.
The practical setup: check your query sources twice a day at fixed times, morning and mid-afternoon. Keep a running document of your three or four core positions, written in quotable form, so that responding to a familiar question is editing rather than drafting. When something breaks in your category, check your sources immediately rather than waiting for your scheduled pass.
Do not build a system that pings you every time any query arrives. That path leads to answering things you have no business answering, which brings us to the next problem.
Vet the query before you spend an hour on it
Roughly half the queries you see are not worth your time, and telling them apart takes about ninety seconds. The decision to respond to a HARO query should always come after this check, not before it.
Check the outlet. If the query names a publication, go look at it. Does it publish real reporting or is it a content farm assembling roundups? Does it have staff bylines? Has it published in the last month? A named outlet you recognize is worth answering. An anonymous query for a “leading business publication” usually means an agency assembling filler, and your quote will land somewhere that does nothing for you.
Check the specificity. A query that asks for “tips for small business owners” will receive four hundred replies and will produce a listicle. A query that asks how mid-market distributors are handling a specific tariff change will receive maybe fifteen, and the reporter will read all of them. Narrow queries are worth ten broad ones.
Check whether you are genuinely the source. This is the discipline that separates people who get quoted repeatedly from people who never do. If the query is about restaurant labor and you sell restaurant software, you are adjacent, not central, and a good reporter will feel it. Answering anyway costs you nothing on that story and costs you something on the next one, because reporters remember names attached to weak answers.
Watch for pay-to-play. Any query that asks for a fee, a subscription, or a reciprocal link in exchange for inclusion is not journalism. Some of these are dressed up carefully. The tell is that the ask arrives after you respond.
Check the question itself for what it reveals about the draft. Queries come in two shapes, and they need different replies. An open query asks a broad question because the reporter has not decided what the story is yet, and your reply can shape it, which means a strong opinion is an asset. A closed query asks for a specific thing because the draft already exists and there is a hole in paragraph six, which means opinions are a liability and what they want is the fact that fits the hole. You can tell them apart by how narrow the ask is and by whether the query mentions a specific angle or example. Answering a closed query with a manifesto is the most common wasted hour in this entire discipline.
One last filter, and it is about you rather than the query: does answering this put you on record about something you would rather not be on record about. Once a quote runs, it runs. It gets syndicated, scraped, indexed, and increasingly ingested by models that will repeat it back to people asking about your company two years from now. A throwaway line about a competitor, a pricing number you did not clear internally, a prediction you will regret. Read your reply once as though a customer, an investor, and your general counsel will all see it, because eventually all three will.
What to do when you are not the right source
Refer someone, and do it in two sentences.
This feels like giving away an opportunity. It is the opposite. Reporters keep informal lists of people who make their jobs easier, and the person who says “I am not right for this, but Marcus Chen at Verity has run three of these migrations and will talk to you, here is his email” gets added to that list immediately. You have just saved them an hour.
The return arrives later and indirectly. A reporter who has been helped once will often come back to you directly the next time your topic comes up, bypassing the query platform entirely, which is the outcome the whole exercise is aiming at. Every query you answer is a lottery ticket. Every reporter who has your name in a contacts file is an annuity.
The same logic applies to saying no cleanly when a query is close but you cannot make the deadline. One line: cannot make Thursday, happy to talk next time. Reporters read that as professional. Silence they read as nothing at all.
Build a system instead of refreshing an inbox
The people who get quoted consistently are not more insightful than you. They have a repeatable process and you do not.
The process has four standing pieces. A monitoring block, twice daily, capped at ten minutes, across your two platforms and one direct channel. A positions document containing your four or five core arguments, each written as a ready quote block, updated whenever your thinking changes. A credentials file with your exact name, title, company, headshot, and a two-sentence bio, so the attribution block takes ten seconds. A results log where you record every reply you sent, which outlet, which reporter, and whether it landed, because after sixty entries the pattern of what works for you specifically becomes obvious and stops being guesswork.
Set a realistic bar. Eight to twelve well-targeted replies a month, sustained for six months, is a serious program. Most people send forty in the first week and none in the second month.
So: HARO is gone, the model is not, and it moved to Source of Sources, Qwoted, Featured, Help a B2B Writer, ResponseSource, and the open social channels. Pick two platforms plus one direct channel. Vet the query in ninety seconds before you write anything. Send a three-block reply that passes the Paste Test, under two hundred words, with your exact title and one checkable fact. Refer someone else when you are not the right source. Log every attempt. Do that for two quarters and you will stop responding to queries entirely, because reporters will be emailing you first.