Changes to HelpAReporter.com Reflect E-mail Harvesting
If you’re like me and my team of social media relations specialist, you subscribe to Peter Shankman’s newsletter, Help A Reporter Out. Three times a business day, without fail, you get list of several queries from writers, freelancers, journalists and bloggers working on stories to which you and your clients may be able to contribute. But if you’ve perused your Shankmans lately you’ll have noticed a change. No longer does the query, which gives subject, need and deadline, list the writer’s e-mail address. Rather, it’s a coded e-mail that goes into a new hub and relays the message to the writer. So for example, queries that used to appear with the e-mail “foodblogger@suchandsuch.com” will now appear as “queryxxy@helpareporter.com.”
Why the change? You guessed it: too many writers were getting irrelevant e-mails from PR and marketing people like us. I had a chance to ask Shankman about it, and he said in an e-mail, “Too many people harvesting e-mails, too many people adding to lists, too many people spamming and not playing nice. We didn’t have a choice.” Shankman has always been explicit about how to use Help a Reporter Out, so this is no surprise. But it is a shame it had to come to this; I have made numerous valuable friendlies from the newsletter and will continue to endeavor to do so within the new rules. As Shankman might say, play nice!
What does this mean for PR people like me? You have to be quicker in responding to these queries, you can’t let them pile up and then go through them all at once. The coded e-mails used in the newsletter are only live until the deadline set by the writer. In other words, if a writer tells you he is working on a story and his deadline is 5:00 P.M. EST, at 5:01 the e-mail queryxxy@helpareporter.com will go dead.
- Date: 01.21.2010
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