HARO closed and the good journalists moved

The source-request channel most link-building programmes were built on no longer exists in the form they were built for. Cision closed Connectively, the platform that had been Help A Reporter Out, in December 2024. The HARO name was later relaunched as a free email service under different ownership. It is not the same product, and it is not the same journalist list.

If your agency is still reporting HARO placements as a core tactic, ask which platform, and ask to see the outlets.

What happened to the journalists

The reason the original worked was volume on both sides. Enough reporters posting real queries, enough sources answering, and a brand strong enough that national mastheads used it.

When the platform closed, the reporters did not stop needing sources. They went three ways.

Some moved to verification-gated platforms, where sources are checked before they can respond. Qwoted is the main one internationally. SourceBottle has been the Australian option for years and remains useful here. Featured operates a similar model. The gating is the point: a journalist on a gated platform gets fewer responses and a much higher share of usable ones.

Some stopped using platforms entirely and now post requests on their own channels. LinkedIn is where most Australian business and trade journalists ask. Bluesky picked up a chunk of the reporters who left X.

And some went back to their own contact book, which is the outcome the whole channel was designed to avoid.

What is left in the open, free tier skews heavily toward low-authority content sites and outfits producing AI-assembled roundups. Answering those produces links from pages nobody reads.

What still works, and it is a different game

The old play was volume: answer forty queries a week with fast, generic responses and take the hit rate. That play is dead. Gated platforms limit responses, and the reporters who remain are choosing on quality.

What works now looks like this.

Build a source profile a journalist can verify in under a minute. Real name, real title, the registered company name and ABN, a photograph, a direct mobile, and a link to somewhere that shows you have said something on the record before. Gated platforms make this decision on your profile before they read your answer.

Respond inside an hour. Most requests are filled the same day, and the reporter is usually writing while the requests come in.

Answer the question that was asked, in about 100 words, with one specific number and one honest caveat. The caveat is the differentiator. A source who says this works, but not for businesses under about twenty staff, because the setup cost does not amortise, reads as an expert. A source who says everything is great reads as marketing.

Never attach a pitch. No company boilerplate, no offer to also discuss something else. It converts a source answer into a sales email and gets you filtered.

Be specific about what you can and cannot speak to. Reporters keep a list of people who say no to the wrong question. That list is worth more than any placement.

Be honest about the yield

This is a slow channel with a low hit rate, and it always was. The difference is that the old version compensated with volume and the new one cannot.

Treat it as a way to build a handful of real journalist relationships over a year, not as a link engine. Two or three genuine relationships with reporters on your round will outperform fifty scattered quotes in sites you have never heard of, because a relationship gets you the call when a story in your category breaks.

The upside sits somewhere the old scoring never counted. A quote with your name, your company and a number attached, published on a real masthead, is exactly the kind of sentence that AI answer engines retrieve and repeat. That is a durable asset. A link from a content farm is not.

Get verified, answer fewer, and say something a marketer would not.