haro

BusinessWeek: Wasserstein Out, Layoffs Coming

Hamilton Nolan · 09/15/09 12:56PM

In your revenue-generating Tuesday media column: the BusinessWeek bidding draws to a close, Americans would pay only a pittance for newspaper websites, Peter Shankman's getting rich somehow, and the WaPo is determined not to write about dwarves.

How To Become A Millionaire By 'Helping' Reporters

Hamilton Nolan · 10/06/08 11:41AM

Consider Peter Shankman: skydiving flack, taser lover, and the founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the free (!) service that connects reporters with a world of flacks dying to appear in their stories. HARO is a lot like Profnet, except Profnet costs flacks thousands of dollars a year. We wondered why Shankman went to all the trouble of running HARO, and now we know: $800,000 a year! Is this oversharing man the future of flackery? Adweek takes an in-depth look at the HARO phenomenon, and does a little calculating to figure out that Shankman makes more than $3K every day selling ads on his two daily HARO emails, that go out to more than 30,000 flacks and other wannabe media sources. For an hour and a half of work. Okay, that's kind of slick. But you know who thinks HARO sucks? The people at Profnet! HARO's deficiencies: