TL;DR / Key Takeaways
- HARO/Connectively closed 2024-12-09; Source of Sources (free, by HARO's original founder) and the Featured-owned HARO relaunch are the successors.
- Work a portfolio: SOS for free volume, Qwoted/Featured for higher-authority outlets, #journorequest on X and Bluesky for speed.
- AI-generated pitching flooded every platform — generic expert commentary is dead; owned data and real numbers are the only durable differentiator.
- Journalist-written pages are prime AI-answer retrieval targets, making source-request placements a GEO channel, not just a backlink channel.
The saga, for anyone who blinked
Help A Reporter Out spent fifteen years as the default way journalists found sources — and sources found editorial backlinks. Cision folded it into Connectively in 2023, then closed the platform entirely on December 9, 2024. Two things filled the vacuum: Shankman — who built HARO in the first place — started Source of Sources as a free email digest in the original spirit (he asks happy users to donate to animal rescue rather than pay), and Featured.com acquired the dormant HARO brand, relaunching helpareporter.com in April 2025. So in 2026 "HARO" exists again, but it's a different company under a familiar name, and the ecosystem around it has permanently fragmented.
The 2026 stack, by what each is for
| Platform | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Source of Sources | Free (donation-supported) | Volume — up to three daily digests of journalist requests, closest to the original HARO |
| Qwoted | Free tier + paid plans | Higher-authority business and finance outlets; more curation, less flood |
| Featured | Free tier + paid plans | Expert Q&A placements; also now operates the HARO brand |
| HARO (relaunched) | Free | The familiar inbox, under new ownership since April 2025 — quality still settling |
| SourceBottle | Free | AU/UK/international requests the US-centric platforms miss |
| #journorequest on X / Bluesky | Free | Speed — requests appear there before digests send; search the hashtag, reply fast |
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Why the channel got harder — and what still works
Every one of these platforms has the same 2026 problem: AI made pitching free, so journalists now wade through hundreds of fluent, interchangeable, generated responses per request. Some flag it openly; the relaunched HARO drew immediate complaints about exactly this. The consequence is brutal for generic pitching and excellent for anyone with receipts: when every pitch sounds expert, the only differentiators left are the ones a model can't invent — a number you measured, a dataset you own, a thing that actually happened to your business. One honest paragraph with a real statistic now beats five hundred polished words of nothing.
- Lead with a number you own. "We analyzed 2,400 referring domains and 70% shared one anchor" gets quoted; "link building is important in 2026" gets deleted.
- Answer only what you'd survive being quoted on. One request you're genuinely qualified for beats ten sprayed pitches — reply-all spraying is how accounts get muted platform-wide.
- Speed matters more than polish. Most requests close within hours; the #journorequest feeds reward whoever's watching.
- Track the links you earn — they're editorial, contextual and precisely the kind Google's policy treats as the real thing.
The strategic view: this is a GEO channel now
A HARO-style placement was always two assets in one — a backlink and a citation. In 2026 the second asset got more valuable: journalist-written pages are exactly what AI engines retrieve and quote when they assemble answers, and the founding GEO research measured quotations and statistics as the strongest visibility levers there. Which closes the loop: the same original data that wins a journalist's attention is what wins an answer engine's citation. Publish your numbers first on your own site, pitch them through the stack above, and each placement compounds in both indexes. Disclosure where due: building durable third-party coverage is the business Stork Wire is in — the pitching playbook above needs nothing from us, but if you'd rather the coverage came to you, that's the product.