PR Newswire vs. HARO: A spam assault, and a Pepsi-style challenge

Jordan Golson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:27:10 -0400

Help A Reporter's Peter Shankman dropped a bomb on PR Newswire in one of yesterday's newsletters. The Standard profiled HARO -- or Help A Reporter Out -- last week. The service is a free email newsletter service for reporters to find sources for their stories; it's an upstart competitor PR Newswire's long-standing ProfNet, which charges potential sources thousands of dollars a year.

PR Newswire and ProfNet responded to the story and started a bit of a war of words between Shankman and a ProfNet executive.

This week, the saga continues. It seems an exec in the San Jose PR Newswire offices emailed quite a few reporters who were using HARO to find sources last week, asking them to switch to ProfNet for their queries. Shankman:

Well... I guess that's one way of doing it. I just kinda assumed that every reporter on HARO knew about Profnet, and chose to post their queries either on HARO alone, or both Profnet and HARO. I always thought it was about getting the reporter their leads in the best way possible, but heck, I'm up for the Pepsi Challenge! That would be fun! Which one provides better sources...

Tsk tsk, PR Newswire. Spamming is bad enough, put picking up email addresses from a competitor for the sole purpose of convincing them to join your service? Peter Shankman then wrote this morning about one reporter who took up his challenge and submitted the same query to ProfNet and HARO.

I've only got one thing to say this fine morning. Seems a reporter from the NY Times responded last night to my little Pepsi Challenge... She got close to 30 leads from her post on HARO. She writes: "You know how many leads I got from you, right? Well I also posted on profnet at the same time. That one resulted in exactly...zero"

If HARO's aggressive growth keeps up (more than 3,000 new subscribers in the past week, almost to 20,000), perhaps ProfNet really does have some worrying to do.

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