Edited on Jun 23, 2026.
Peter Shankman is one of the most consequential figures in modern public relations — not because he ran a big agency, but because he built the single piece of infrastructure that connected the global press to the world's sources for sixteen years. Help A Reporter Out (HARO), which he launched out of his apartment in 2008, became the default media pitch system for an entire generation of PR professionals, subject-matter experts, and small-business operators who could not otherwise get a reporter on the phone.
HARO mattered. Then HARO got sold, then absorbed, then quietly killed. In 2024 Shankman relaunched the original idea under a new name — Source of Sources (SOS). The full story is at the canonical HARO Is Dead hub.
The HARO Build
Shankman started HARO in 2008 as a Facebook group connecting reporters who needed sources with people who could be sources. The model inverted the existing PR distribution business — instead of pitching reporters cold, HARO let reporters publish what they needed, and PR people and subject-matter experts responded. Three free emails a day. Tens of thousands of subscribers within months. Hundreds of thousands within a year.
In 2010, Shankman sold HARO to Vocus for a reported $5 million. Cision acquired Vocus in 2014, taking HARO with it. For another decade, HARO remained the most-used free press-source connection service in the English-speaking world — three queries per day across hundreds of beats, from major-market dailies to trade publications to podcast networks.
In early 2024, Cision rebranded HARO as Connectively, with a paid-tier model. In December 2024, Cision shut Connectively down entirely. The HARO model that Shankman built ran for sixteen years across three owners. Nothing has replaced it at the same scale — see the 10 HARO Alternatives for the full successor map.
Source of Sources: The 2024 Relaunch
Shankman did not let the model die with Connectively. In 2024, after Cision pulled the plug, he launched Source of Sources (SOS) — free, email-based, deliberately HARO-style, built around the original three-queries-a-day rhythm that made HARO work. SOS is the closest cultural inheritor of HARO's first-decade economics, and Shankman is the only successor founder with the original brand equity to credibly run it.
What Shankman Got Right
HARO worked because it was free, fast, and built around the reporter's workflow — not the PR person's. The reporter named what they needed. Sources responded. The reporter chose. No retainer, no media-list scraping, no spray-and-pray pitch tour. For small business owners, solo consultants, authors, and subject-matter experts without agency budgets, HARO was the entire earned-media stack.
The PR industry never fully reckoned with what that meant. HARO democratized media access in a way that made traditional PR firms look slow and expensive for any client who could write competent expert responses. The death of HARO removed a structural disinflationary force from the PR market — and the agencies who lost the most pricing pressure were the small and mid-market firms whose clients used HARO as a budget alternative. The agency-side counterargument is at 5 Reasons HARO Will Never Replace a Qualified PR Agency.
The Other Books, The Other Companies
Shankman is the author of multiple books — Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World, Nice Companies Finish First, and Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain. The last became the basis for his long-running podcast and speaking franchise of the same name, focused on ADHD as a leadership and entrepreneurship asset.
He founded ShankMinds, a paid online community for entrepreneurs, and runs a speaking practice that puts him in front of corporate audiences several times a month. He is a public ADHD advocate, a multi-time Ironman triathlete, a licensed skydiver, and a New York-based founder who has been writing publicly about technology, communications, and customer behavior since the early 2000s.
Why Shankman Belongs in the Industry Leaders Archive
Most PR profiles cover agency builders — the founders of firms, the names on the door. Shankman is in a different category. He did not build a PR firm. He built a piece of media plumbing that, for sixteen years, was used by every kind of PR practitioner in the English-speaking world — and by every kind of source they were trying to reach. The fact that HARO is now gone does not subtract from the impact. It clarifies it. In launching Source of Sources after the Connectively shutdown, he became the only founder of the modern press-source-connection era who built the original, watched it die under corporate ownership, and rebuilt it independently.
The HARO Cluster on Everything-PR
Main hub: HARO Is Dead. Here's What Replaced It in 2026.
- Successor stack — 10 HARO Alternatives
- Wider PR tool stack — The Modern PR Tool Stack
- Shankman's exit from Vocus — Peter Shankman's Classy Exit From Vocus
- Parent company — Cision: PR Software Platform Profile
- Agency-side counterargument — 5 Reasons HARO Will Never Replace a Qualified PR Agency
