Help a Reporter Out (HARO), discontinued vs. PR Newswire

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) was (and today, HERO is) an incredibly valuable tool that effectively bridges the gap between journalists and PR practitioners, and it filled a need on both ends. A perfect solution to an ongoing industry problem. When I have a client that needs media coverage, and a lead is shared in the daily email that fits the client's expertise, it creates an opportunity that we may never have otherwise been able to identify.

Incentivized

PR Newswire is a terrific solution for ensuring that news is distributed in a way that is findable and searchable. It also automatically ties the news to ticker symbols. It's not a useful or meaningful solution for actually securing news coverage. It still requires picking up the phone and pitching media.

Incentivized

• Pushes PR opportunities right to your desktop several times a day
• Provides media opportunities for just about every industry and if you monitor it regularly, on just about every topic you can think of
• Provides an easy way to contact reporters with relevant information
• Media outlets are verified for you

Incentivized

• User-friendly - PR Newswire has a very user-friendly website that makes it simple and easy to get a news release set up for a distribution relatively quickly. You can also save your selections from a previous distribution to make it go even faster. Since I am pretty much always sending out my releases to the same distribution list, all I have to do is check that box.
• Customer support - When you submit a release via the web portal, you have several options about when it will be released. I typically want my releases to go out as quickly as possible, but even then I know an account representative will take a look at my release and accompanying multimedia materials and give me a quick call to confirm and make sure everything is set before officially sending it out. It's a helpful step without making the process cumbersome.
• Reports - PR Newswire provides timely and comprehensive reports, so it's easy to tell the where the news release went.

Incentivized

• I've noticed that some queries are incredibly vague to the point where they could or could not apply to me. I feel like they should implement more strict parameters on what the query has to include.
• Sometimes the outlet is marked anonymous which is not beneficial at all to those who are browsing queries. I think the outlet should be required as that is a pretty essential piece of information to consider.
• I think they email slightly too often. My inbox gets flooded with HARO emails and I'm not able to go through all of them because they get buried. Maybe explore a new strategy to organize the huge amount of queries that get submitted every day.

Incentivized

• The pricing structure is comprehensive, depending on how far you want your release to go.
• Adding multi-media, such as photos, increases visibility quite a bit but PR Newswire charges extra for photos.
• PR Newswire also charges an annual fee for storing your logo, which I think should be free for organizations that already have an account (and pay a membership fee).

Incentivized

It takes only a few minutes to set up your account. Then, the rest is just checking the push emails, and responding to relevant queries.

Incentivized

PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service

Incentivized

Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.

They are different tools. While HARO pretty much gives you feedback on media opportunities you can pitch for and allows you to get in touch with the reporter, so you can get exposure and they can find people for their news. Cision allows you to syndicate your press releases. You need to have a written press release in order to use it.

Incentivized

PR Newswire and Businesswire are familiar, similar products in terms of newswire distribution services. Many times it comes down to client familiarity with one service over the other, the cost per distribution, the reach of distribution, as well as other related fees, i.e., you have to be a member of PR Newswire to use the service and then pay fees on top of that for individual distributions.

Incentivized

• A hard thing to measure in terms of actual sales dollars, however, being able to provide fresh content is essential to any brand. When someone mentions they saw the published piece or it grows organically from social media, that is a win.

Incentivized

• We lost one of our pre paid distributions due to the expiration date
• We would like to see more communication between the client and the representative or account manager
• We have had success in getting larger publications to pick up our over the wire publication

Incentivized