PR Strategy: The Filter 88% of Reporters Apply

On December 9, 2024, Cision permanently shut down the platform that had been connecting reporters with sources under the name Help a Reporter Out since 2008. Four months later a different company bought the name back and restarted it. Today helpareporter.com is live, and its whole offer to a small business owner is one line: subscribe for free daily media queries.

Almost every PR guide written for small businesses sits on one side or the other of that gap, which is why the advice contradicts itself. Some of it still tells you to sign up for a service that did not exist on the day it was written. Some of it tells you the free channel died and you now need to pay for a replacement. Neither is right today. The more useful question is the one nobody seems to ask: why did a free service with sixteen years of history collapse, and what does that tell you about how to use the thing that took its place?

The reason it closed is the reason your pitch gets ignored

Cision’s own notice is short. “As of December 9, 2024, the Connectively (HARO) platform has been permanently discontinued,” it reads. “This decision was made after carefully evaluating customer feedback, in order to align our efforts with the tools that deliver the most value to our PR and communications customers” (cision.com). The company redirected its attention to CisionOne, the paid platform it sells to communications teams.

The buyer said something more revealing. Featured.com announced on April 16, 2025 that it had acquired Help a Reporter Out from Cision, which had owned it since 2014, and that HARO “will remain free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter ads, and will return to its original format of delivering daily opportunities via email.” Founder and CEO Brett Farmiloe gave the reason in the same release: “As AI floods the internet with generic content, journalists need credible, human sources more than ever” (prnewswire.com).

Here is our read, and it is a read rather than a reported fact, because neither company published its internal numbers. A query service has exactly one scarce resource, and it is not pitches. It is the reporter’s willingness to open the replies. Sources want to send more. Reporters want to receive fewer and better. Every service in this category has to pick a side, and any pricing model that lets sources buy more volume is quietly taxing the only thing that makes the service worth using. When the reporters stop reading, the sources have nothing left to answer, and the whole market clears at zero.

That is not a history lesson. It is the strategy. If the scarce resource is a reporter’s attention, then a small business PR plan is a subtraction problem, not an outreach campaign.

The filter, stated in the reporters’ own numbers

Muck Rack surveyed 1,044 journalists between January 30 and March 2, 2026, and used 897 responses in its final analysis after data quality checks. Two of its findings sit oddly together until you see the filter between them. 86 percent of journalists say at least some of their stories originate from PR pitches. 88 percent immediately disregard pitches that miss their beat (Muck Rack, State of Journalism 2026).

The door is open. There is just a very fast bouncer standing in it. And the bouncer is not judging your writing, your logo, or how many outlets you sent to. It is checking one thing before anything else gets read.

Relevance is also broader than a beat. In the same survey, 78 percent of journalists said a pitch feels genuinely relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to. Nearly half said they seldom receive pitches that match their coverage at all. And when asked what they actually value in a pitch, journalists named four things: clear relevance to their beat, access to relevant sources, original research or data, and high-resolution images.

Read that list again as a small business owner rather than as a marketer, because this is the part the PR industry has no commercial reason to point out. Two of those four items are things you already own and cannot be bought by a competitor with a bigger budget. You are the access to a relevant source, because you run the business the story is about. And you sit inside the community the audience belongs to, which is the definition of a local business. A national brand has to manufacture both of those. You have them by default.

The fourth item is the cheapest thing on the list, and it is worth asking whether you have ever actually sent one. High-resolution images cost nothing beyond the time it takes to shoot them. A reporter working to a deadline with no usable photo has to either commission one, run the story smaller, or run somebody else’s.

Three moves that fit inside one working week

1. Write down the two things you can be quoted on

Not your services. The two questions a reporter might actually be asking that you can answer with something specific. A roofer’s honest list might be “what a hailstorm claim really costs a homeowner in this county” and “how long a permit currently takes in this city.” Those are answerable in four sentences with real numbers, and they are checkable, which is what makes them usable.

Write both on one line each and keep them where you can see them, because every query you read gets checked against those two lines and nothing else. A query that does not match is not an opportunity you are missing. It is the 88 percent filter, applied by you, before you spend a reporter’s attention and your own hour.

2. Build the one page a reporter can use without replying to you

Make a plain page on your own site and put on it: the legal name of the business and the spelling you want in print, your name and title, one sentence describing what the business does, the city and county you serve, two or three numbers you can stand behind and would repeat under scrutiny, a phone number that a human answers, and a high-resolution photo of you and one of the work.

The numbers matter more than the prose. “We have been in business eleven years and have replaced roughly 400 roofs in Fresno County” is quotable. “We are a leading provider of quality roofing solutions” is not, and it is also the kind of unbackable claim the FTC has been bringing cases about in the AI market, which is worth reading up on before you write anything about your own results. Our piece on what the FTC rule changed about customer testimonials covers the same ground for the reviews on your site.

This page is the asset. Everything else in PR is an attempt to get someone to look at it.

3. Subscribe to the free feeds and answer inside the deadline

HARO is free at helpareporter.com and sends daily media queries by email, which is the format it ran on before it was sold and shut down. It is now operated by Featured.

Featured itself offers a free plan at $0 with no time limit, a Lite plan at $29 per month billed annually at $348, and a Pro plan at $79 per month billed annually at $948, all verified on its pricing page today. Every tier gets the same features, including responding to journalist requests from HARO and LinkedIn; the paid tiers buy more daily AI usage rather than more access.

Qwoted runs the sharpest version of this trade-off. Its Basic plan is free and gives you two pitches a month with a two-hour response delay. Its Pro plan is $149 per month and gives you 35 pitches with no delay, per its pricing page today. That two-hour delay is worth staring at, because it tells you exactly what is being sold. It is not access and it is not volume. It is speed against a deadline. Which means the free tier is perfectly good for queries with a deadline of next week and structurally useless for anything filed today.

So the honest version of move three for most owners is: take the free feeds, read them once a day, and answer only what matches your two lines, in full, the same hour. Buy speed later, if you ever find yourself losing placements because you were two hours late.

The thing not to buy first

Paid press release distribution is the first thing most owners reach for, and it is the one purchase where the usual justification does not survive contact with the vendor documentation. EIN Presswire charges $149 for a single news release, $499 for five, and $999 for fifteen, per its pricing page today. That is real distribution and it does place your release on real sites.

The part that gets oversold is the search benefit. Google’s own spam policies name, as an example of link spam, “advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.” The same page adds that “it’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value” (Google Search Central). In plain terms: the links in a paid release are supposed to be marked so they do not pass ranking credit, so buying one as an SEO play is buying the thing Google has explicitly told you it will discount.

There are legitimate reasons to pay for the wire. A regulated disclosure, a funding announcement your investors expect to see on a recognized service, a recall notice that has to reach newsrooms fast. Getting found in search is not on that list. If earned attention is the goal, note that Google now also lets readers mark your site as a Preferred Source, which we covered in Google Preferred Sources, and that lever runs on the readers you already have rather than on distribution you buy.

Where AI helps here, and where it quietly hurts

82 percent of journalists now report using at least one AI tool, up from 77 percent the year before, with ChatGPT at 47 percent, Gemini at 22 percent and Claude at 12 percent, according to the same Muck Rack survey. Concern about unchecked AI rose to 26 percent, up 8 points year over year. The people you are pitching use these tools daily and are correspondingly good at spotting their output.

Which sets up the inversion at the heart of this. AI in PR is sold as a way to produce more outreach. That is pointed at the one resource the channel cannot spare. The defensible use runs the other way: point it at your own materials, where volume costs nobody anything.

Concretely, that means using an assistant to turn years of jumbled experience into the two lines from move one, to draft and tighten the reporter page from move two, to check that a number you are about to state is actually what your books say, and to get a four-sentence answer written and sent inside a deadline that would otherwise pass you by. ChatGPT is free at $0, $8 a month for Go and $20 a month for Plus, per its pricing page today, and Featured’s free tier includes its own PR-specific chat. None of that is a large budget decision.

What it should never do is write the pitch and send it. Farmiloe’s line about AI flooding the internet with generic content is the buying case for the channel you are trying to enter; adding to that flood is the fastest way to get filed under it. The scarce, valuable thing you are selling a reporter is that you are a real person who did the actual work and will put your name to a number. We wrote about how AI text watermarking quietly raises the value of what a machine cannot supply, and this is that principle with a deadline attached.

This is also why the move does not cost anyone a job. Nobody at a five-person company was doing PR before. There is no press officer being replaced here, and no agency retainer being cut. There is an owner who was invisible to reporters and now is not, which is capacity that did not exist rather than capacity taken from someone.

What this will not do

It will not get you covered on a schedule. Queries arrive when a reporter happens to need what you know, which may be twice in a month or twice in a year, and no amount of preparation changes their news cycle. It will not work if your two lines are not genuinely specific, because the filter is applied by a person who reads pitches all day. It will not substitute for a specialist in a crisis, when the question is what you are legally and reputationally able to say and the answer needs a lawyer rather than a template. And it will not produce a number you can put in a forecast; earned coverage is lumpy by nature, which is exactly why it is worth building on a channel that costs nothing to keep open.

Two checks, both of which you can do before the end of the week. Open your website on a phone and time how long it takes to find your legal business name, your title, and a phone number a reporter could call by 4 p.m. Then look at the last photograph you sent anyone about your business and ask whether a picture editor could run it at full width. If either check fails, that is your PR strategy for this week, and it is more valuable than any pitch you could write in the same hour.

Frequently asked questions

Is HARO actually free again, or is that the old version people remember?
It is free now. Cision permanently discontinued the platform on December 9, 2024 (cision.com), and Featured.com announced on April 16, 2025 that it had acquired Help a Reporter Out and would keep it “free for journalists and sources, supported by newsletter ads” (prnewswire.com). Signing up at helpareporter.com today costs nothing.

How many queries should I answer a week?
Fewer than you think. 88 percent of journalists immediately disregard pitches that miss their beat (Muck Rack, State of Journalism 2026), so answering a query you are only loosely qualified for is not a lottery ticket, it is a deletion. Two well-matched answers a week beats twenty sent hopefully.

Is a paid press release worth it for a local business?
Rarely, and almost never for search. Google’s spam policies treat links in paid press releases as link spam unless they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute (Google Search Central), so the ranking benefit is the part being oversold. At $149 for a single release from EIN Presswire (einpresswire.com), the same money is better spent on a decent photographer for the images reporters said they want.

Can I just have AI write my pitches?
You can, and it works against you. 82 percent of journalists use AI tools themselves (Muck Rack, State of Journalism 2026), which makes generic output easy to recognize, and the reason the free query channel exists at all is that reporters are short of human sources. Use AI on your own fact page, your numbers, and your speed. Put your own sentences in the reply.

This piece was prompted by the PR Strategy Builder prompt on BusinessPrompter.com, which is filed under Marketing and Sales and described in one line as creating a PR strategy to build media relationships and earn coverage. One caution if you go and read it: the explanatory panels below the title on that page currently describe a different exercise about selecting and integrating marketing technology, not media relations. The title and the one-line summary are the accurate description of what the prompt is for.