After HARO: Where Source Requests Actually Live Now

For sixteen years, Help a Reporter Out — HARO to everyone — was the default plumbing between journalists and sources. Cision, which had acquired it in 2014, rebranded the product as Connectively in 2024 and then announced its shutdown; the service went dark on December 9, 2024. The closure eliminated the one place virtually every working journalist and publicist checked daily, and its audience scattered across a dozen successors of very different quality. If you are still deciding where to answer source requests in 2026, here is the honest map.

What actually replaced HARO

• Source of Sources (SOS). Peter Shankman, who created HARO in 2008, launched his own successor shortly after Connectively's shutdown closed the circle. It keeps the original spirit: a lean, emailed digest of journalist queries, minimal layers between reporter and source.
• Qwoted. A venture-backed platform where journalists post requests and experts respond through structured profiles. Fast-growing, with free and paid tiers; response volume per query is high, so differentiation matters.
• Featured (formerly Terkel). Flips the model: contributors answer broad questions and answers can be published as attributed content on partner sites. Useful for quote volume; the placements are mostly non-news publications, so treat it as content marketing, not media relations.
• Help a B2B Writer. A focused newsletter connecting B2B content writers with experts. Small, free, and disproportionately good for SaaS and professional-services niches.
• Regional and beat-specific services. In the UK, ResponseSource's journalist request service remains the institutional channel; several trade communities run their own request lists. For niche players these often convert better than the big platforms.

Why the shutdown hurt more than a product dying usually does

HARO was infrastructure, not just a tool. Journalism schools taught it, agency onboarding assumed it, and a generation of sources built first media relationships through its emails. Its death therefore stranded two populations at once: journalists who lost a firehose of willing experts, and experts who had no idea how coverage happened without it. That double vacuum is why so many successors launched at once — and why their quality varies so widely. You are not choosing between equivalents; you are choosing which trade-offs you accept: speed versus vetting, volume versus signal, free versus paid access.

How the new market differs

The fragmentation changed behavior on both sides. Journalists now post to several platforms at once, which means every good query attracts fifty answers instead of twenty. Sources, meanwhile, face a paywall maze: most successors restrict free accounts, and a secondary industry of agencies answering queries on your behalf has grown up — with the predictable result that low-effort ghostwritten answers get ignored by reporters who can smell them. personal branding.

Two things have not changed. First, speed still wins: journalists working on deadline shortlist the first credible answers, so answering within hours beats a perfect answer tomorrow. Second, specificity still wins: the answers that get quoted name numbers, name mistakes, and take positions.

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A working system for the splintered era

1. Register where your buyers' media are. SOS and one general platform cover national press; add the niche service for your industry. Three channels checked daily beat seven checked weekly.
2. Answer only queries you can genuinely serve. Ten relevant answers a month produce more coverage than a hundred spray-and-pray submissions — and the spray version can get your domain flagged as a spam source on some platforms.
3. Write the quote, not a pitch. Give the journalist a publishable two-to-four-sentence quote with a number in it, plus a one-line credential. No attachments, no "let me know if you want more."
4. Track the payoff, not the volume. Log every placement and what it produced. Quote farms generate activity metrics; the point of source work is links, authority and inbound.

A brief history helps calibrate expectations. HARO earned trust by being boring: one email, three times a day, queries with outlet names attached. Every successor is trying to add software to that simplicity — profiles, scoring, AI answer tools — and each layer is a new place to differentiate or a new place to look identical. The practitioners doing best in the post-HARO market use the platforms for discovery and then behave as if no platform existed: direct, human, fast answers that could be pasted into a story unchanged.

What to watch out for

The successors vary in vetting quality, and the query market has always attracted two grifts. One: fake "journalists" harvesting expert answers to publish on their own ad sites — check that the requester's outlet and history are real before giving your best material. Two: services selling "guaranteed HARO placements," now rebranded for the new platforms, which are typically the old backlink economy wearing a press badge. The free test stays the same: ask what happens if you get no coverage, and whether the "coverage" is a real editorial outlet.

HARO's death did not kill source requests. It killed the illusion that answering them can be outsourced to volume.

One last calibration: measure the new platforms the way you would measure any hire. Give each a 90-day trial with a defined bar — three real editorial placements or it loses the daily attention. Platforms earn their place in your morning; nothing gets it by default.

Your first step this week

Create a profile on Source of Sources and one paid-or-free platform that fits your niche, upload a two-line credential, and answer three queries you are genuinely qualified for within four hours of them appearing. Log every answer in a spreadsheet with the outlet, date and outcome — that spreadsheet, not your answer count, is the program.