HARO as marketers knew it shut down in 2024; another company revived the name in 2025
THE CIRCULATING CLAIM, PARAPHRASEDMarketers and journalists can sign up for HARO, Help a Reporter Out, the same service it has always been.
What changed
Help a Reporter Out, universally known as HARO, spent over a decade as the default way journalists sourced expert quotes and marketers earned press mentions. The service that built that reputation no longer exists, and the story since has three acts. Pages written between the acts are wrong in ways their authors have not noticed.
Act one: rebrand. First, Cision, HARO’s owner, folded the service into a platform called Connectively, retiring the HARO name and mechanics marketers knew.
Act two: shutdown. Cision then discontinued Connectively entirely on December 9, 2024, announcing the end of the service in its own notice and directing remaining users elsewhere. That was the end of the original HARO service line, under any name.
Act three: revival under new ownership. In April 2025, Featured.com acquired the HARO brand from Cision and relaunched HARO as a free, standalone service. One more twist in the naming: Featured also came to operate a separate platform of its own under the Connectively name, per its own documentation, unrelated to Cision’s retired platform; the revived HARO remains its own distinct service.
What guides get wrong
Pages published before December 2024, and some carrying later update dates, still present the original HARO in the present tense: the old sign-up flow, the old addresses, the old mechanics, with no mention that the original service was discontinued. A reader following those instructions today is being guided through a service that ceased to exist, toward a namesake that works differently under different ownership.
What is true now
- The original HARO, and its Cision successor Connectively, were discontinued as of December 9, 2024.
- A service called HARO exists again, operated by Featured.com since April 2025. It is a revival of the brand, not a continuation of the old platform.
- Journalist-sourcing as a category continues, through the revived HARO, Featured’s own platform, Qwoted, and others.
Why this entry exists
“HARO” is one of the most-recommended tactics in marketing content, which means one shutdown quietly invalidated instructions in guides that still circulate as current. This entry documents the timeline with sources, so those pages can be corrected to reflect which HARO their readers will actually find.