Help a Reporter Out Is Back: This Is the Guy Who Revived It, with Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe on The Edward Show

Host: Edward Sturm. Guest: Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, who had acquired Help a Reporter Out (HARO) from Cision a week earlier. Recorded April 22, 2025, the day HARO's first relaunch emails went out; published on YouTube April 23, 2025. Runs 31:09. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f__swX0YfPk

Lightly edited for clarity. Speaker labels retained. Transcribed from the episode's YouTube captions; filler words and false starts removed, proper nouns corrected, wording otherwise unchanged. The host's mid-episode sponsor read is marked rather than reproduced.

Edward Sturm: I've been using Help a Reporter Out for decades. Like, decades. And you email me and you're like, "Yeah, we just bought Help a Reporter Out. We're bringing it back."

Brett Farmiloe: Good way to get an email open these days.

Edward Sturm: I guess it's a great email to receive.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I think that your enthusiasm is very consistent with what I've seen in the inbox.

Edward Sturm: In fact, when you put out that announcement, I had multiple people email me and they're like, "Edward, did you see this?" I'm like, "Yes, this is crazy."

Brett Farmiloe: Well, I saw your video. I was sitting in an airport and I was doing some research on what people are saying, and your video is one of the first things that popped up. So I figured that you'd have some good insights to share.

Edward Sturm: Oh, yeah. Well, this is going to be the new video now when people search Help a Reporter Out on YouTube.

Brett Farmiloe: Awesome.

Edward Sturm: It's Brett bringing Help a Reporter Out, reviving it, bringing it back from the dead. So, okay, for people who don't know, Help a Reporter Out... actually, I'll have you. I think you could probably explain it better than I can.

Brett Farmiloe: Sure. Help a Reporter Out connects journalists with sources so that they could connect and create some amazing stories. And, like you said, it's been around since 2008 and has gone through a couple of ownership changes, and it's back. Today was the first email that got sent out, and I was very, very surprised to see some really good outlets that were in there, and the inbox is a fun place to be right now.

Edward Sturm: That's amazing. The first email just went, dude. Thank you again for coming on on the day that you were literally right after sending out the first email reviving it. I really thought it was gone. So, okay, Help a Reporter Out, for people who don't know. If you're a journalist and you need an expert source for your story, you're writing a story, you need an expert source to corroborate something or shed more light on something, you put out a request. It's free for the journalist. You put out a request to Help a Reporter Out, and then an email goes out, three emails a day go out, to different experts in the network. And it's free to be an expert in the network. You pick which subjects you're interested in, and then three times a day you get emails from journalists in those subjects, and you can respond to journalists. And if a journalist accepts your quote, then you get press, you get clout, and if you're into search engine optimization, you also get a backlink, which boosts your domain authority and makes ranking for competitive keywords a lot easier. So that's HARO. And there was so much success from this that there's been lots of other platforms that have done this, for example featured.com, which you founded, originally as Terkel. I was using it back when it was Terkel, and then you rebranded it to Featured. Actually, I want to ask about that later on. And so featured.com is one of these, and then, I guess, featured.com acquired Help a Reporter Out? Or is it independent? I'm also curious how they're going to work together.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, first of all, great rundown. I've got to get you a HARO t-shirt when we print them. That was a good description. So HARO operates independently of featured.com. The transaction was essentially Featured acquired Help a Reporter Out from Cision. And, like I said, today is the first day that we're starting to revive it and send that out. And so a couple of things that I would love to clarify. First of all, people were really, really excited. It blew my expectations away in terms of seeing this revival coming in. I knew it got discontinued for a reason. I knew that some journalists and newsrooms had lost trust in HARO, mainly because of this rise of AI and misinformation. And so we're on a mission to really course-correct a lot of that stuff. I think step one for us is reviving the service. Step two is working on restoring that trust in HARO. I think that comes in multiple different ways. Number one, it's combating AI, so it's basically getting that out of the platform. It's equipping journalists and reporters with community tools to report a lot of the bad actors that can surface. And then it's also going on this quest to do some identity verification, to make sure that people are who they say they are. This is very timely, but the Press Gazette came out with a story, an investigative report, that forced, I think it was about a dozen publications, to retract stories for quoting people who weren't actually people. They didn't exist. And so I think that platforms like ours, whether that's HARO or Featured, are up against this unique situation where it really requires full efforts from everyone involved, whether that's a source who's submitting a query, whether that's a reporter who's publishing a story featuring some insights, or whether that's a platform like ours that needs to take a shared responsibility.

Edward Sturm: That's amazing. And I really appreciate you explaining that, because something that I wanted to ask was how this would be different from Source of Sources. Source of Sources was founded by Peter Shankman, who originally founded Help a Reporter Out back in 2008. He founded it and then he sold it, and then he started basically a clone of Help a Reporter Out called Source of Sources. But Source of Sources bans anybody who spams a journalist in their network. So in Source of Sources, if a journalist receives a low-effort response, or something that's unrelated, or just a pitch for something different, or AI slop, any of this stuff, then that person is completely banned. And so I wanted to ask how the new Help a Reporter Out would be different, but you explained it. Identity verification does not exist in Source of Sources.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. With featured.com, we've been on this three-and-a-half-year journey where we've put tech at the forefront of everything that we're doing, whether that's AI, whether that's identity verification, a lot of the community standards that we have. All of it's tech-driven. I think what we're really looking forward to is taking this email newsletter service that has existed for a couple of decades and applying some of the technical learnings that we've got so that we could try to combat it. I would be totally lying if I said this is going to be perfect from day one. I think that email by email, day by day, we're going to get better, and our goal is just to create something that's very helpful for the journalism industry, for people who want to get their voice featured in the media. And you raised another important point, that it's free for both sides. For the last three and a half years of running Featured, which Featured will continue to operate, the business model there is a freemium model where anyone can answer three questions a month at no cost, and then we have paid subscriptions for people who want to submit additional submissions past that. With HARO, it's free for both sides and it's fully supported by newsletter ads. That's the whole business model. And so I think that the business model affords some new luxuries that we haven't been able to really explore with Featured. And that's the really interesting part, where now we might be able to really unlock value for both sides.

[Sponsor message from the host: Compact Keywords]

Edward Sturm: Back to the podcast. By the way, it's amazing. So yeah, Help a Reporter Out is free for everybody. Featured.com, I got your email. You just dropped the price, the monthly price, down to $19 a month, or $11 a month if you pay annually.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah.

Edward Sturm: Crazy. Because I made a podcast about it literally almost a year and a half ago, in January last year, and I think the price was $99 a month, and I was using it at $99 a month, and I was like, everyone has to use featured.com because my acceptance rate is 76%. This is crazy. And I'm a good writer, I'm a very credible person, but 76% of my submissions to featured.com were accepted. So I would respond to a journalist on your service and there was a 76% chance that that journalist was going to use my response, which was crazy. And that was $99 a month. And then you dropped it to, I think, $32 a month, and now it's $19. Amazing.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, there's three different plans. Well, four different plans. There's the free plan. There's the $19 a month Lite plan that allows for up to 10 submissions a month. We just launched that in the last couple of weeks because we recognized that people wanted to submit more than three but didn't necessarily need the $49 a month Pro plan that comes with unlimited submissions. So we've got that plan, which is really popular. And then there's the Business plan that's $99 a month, and that allows you to submit byline articles in addition to answers. And so we've seen some really good traction with all of those plans across the board. So really excited for all of that.

Edward Sturm: Can you tell me about that last plan?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, the Business plan. So it comes with unlimited answer submissions. It comes with data, including domain authority and link attributions, so you could prioritize your opportunities. It comes with byline articles, where we've heard from a lot of experts that they want to express their knowledge in more than four to eight sentences in terms of answers, and they want to be able to author a full-length post and have that pitched to different publications.

Edward Sturm: So that's huge.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. So byline articles is one for us where anyone can write an article, choose up to five different publications to pitch, and then those publications can claim that article on a first-come, first-served basis and publish it to the website with attribution for the author. So we're seeing some good traction on that. Still got a lot of ways to go there. There's also interview profiles, which is kind of a Q&A profile with experts. And then included in the Business plan is our premium API that allows you to essentially take all the media opportunities that we have on Featured, put it into a native portal, and then be able to submit answers via your API, which a lot of agencies have found to be very useful because they're essentially able to white-label the service without sending clients over to Featured. And that's been a game changer for us.

Edward Sturm: Wow. And I also want to go back to Help a Reporter Out. I like what you said about how we're upgrading it, we're making improvements email by email. I'm a tech founder, so what a lot of people don't realize is it's just completely iterative. You see what works, what doesn't. You make fixes on the fly. You make more fixes on the fly. I'm very curious about your approach to combat AI slop, because I think Reddit is a pretty good example. If you copy something that was written by ChatGPT and you paste it into Reddit, some subreddits will just automatically not accept it, because there are special characters that ChatGPT is more likely to use, for example, or special patterns of writing that ChatGPT is more likely to use. Now, 4o has gotten a lot better at getting past AI writing detection programs, ChatGPT-4o, but it's still not perfect. And I guess I'm curious how you've approached that, because it is such a huge problem.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, I think that, look, the AI detection systems are not perfect, and the real baseline that we have, in regards to HARO, is if a response doesn't help a reporter out, then you will potentially be blocked from using HARO. I think that's the baseline that we're starting from. And then we've got to have different systems designed to basically have checks and balances, so that if a reporter does say, hey, thumbs down on this response, we get that and we're looking at the response that was sent and why it was given a thumbs down, or, even worse, it was just reported as spam by the reporter and they actually wrote a report for us to check out. We basically just have to take a look at that, and we can take a really hard-line stance with it. I think that'll be one of the biggest surprises for the community, who's traditionally used to a way of using HARO which, I've seen it time and time again, is a quantity approach. You're submitting, and it's a numbers game. That's not very helpful. And so I think that the thing that we have a liberty to do, because we have a free business model that's fully supported by ads, is we could take a hard line to say, hey, if you're not providing value to reporters, you unfortunately can't be a part of HARO. And that's the thing that we're starting off from day one with, is we need to take a hard stance, because there is a bunch of misinformation that's out there, there's a bunch of AI that's being used, and as a platform that needs to take a shared responsibility on that, we have to take a hard stance.

Edward Sturm: Is there auto-detection for AI writing?

Brett Farmiloe: There's a ton of different stuff that we're looking at. There's a ton of stuff that we've integrated and implemented. And, bottom line, at the end of the day, I just got back from a Google Cloud conference out in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. One of the notebooks that I took back for my three kids said "two steps ahead." That's basic, and it was like a Google Cloud security notebook. And two steps ahead for us is where we're trying to be in terms of this, because the innovations that are happening within the space, especially from people who are trying to game the system, because it is very lucrative to be featured in different publications like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and Forbes and a few others that we've seen, we've got to stay two steps ahead in terms of AI detection. And there's a lot of stuff that's coming towards us that allows us to do that, or at least try to do that.

Edward Sturm: The reason I asked is because there are a lot of people who will just naturally use AI to improve their answer, but they won't give an unchecked answer. They'll have their opinion. They'll give their opinion to ChatGPT, ChatGPT will write up their opinion, and maybe they'll submit that, or maybe they'll make a few changes, and maybe that won't get past an AI detection tool, but it is actually this person's unique opinion. It's just written by ChatGPT.

Brett Farmiloe: I think the other thing to know about HARO is HARO is about connecting. It's not necessarily about quotes. It's not about providing a four-to-eight-sentence quote that can be copied and pasted. Oftentimes what a journalist or reporter is looking to do is actually connect with the source and get the full story. And so a lot of journalists will be transparent about that in the query that they're submitting. But oftentimes we're seeing that people will actually want to connect with that source to verify them, because there's a lot more pressure from newsrooms to verify sources before you actually feature them in a story. So it's very rare, and this is kind of a surprise and a shock for people who are submitting, that you're just going to submit and it's going to be over and done with. I think oftentimes that's the first intro, if you will, and you've got to work with the reporter to get the story across the finish line. And, going back to your point about how you use AI to get through writer's block, when you do see a query come in that's a great match for yourself, if you don't know exactly where to start, these writing tools like Sonnet from Claude and ChatGPT and some others are really good ways to unlock information that you've got about yourself. So I think that, in that regard, it's a really powerful tool.

Edward Sturm: When a journalist reports a source and it says this source is no good... well, before I even say why I'm even thinking this: the journalist reports a source. Does your team actually go and look at that source and their response before banning them, or is the system just automatic?

Brett Farmiloe: No, absolutely. Look, we've got to tread lightly, and it's a very heavy manual lift for our team in these first days and first weeks and first months as we revive HARO, to make sure we're doing the right things for both sides. So yeah, everything's right now manually done. We're looking at everything. We're taking it on a case-by-case basis and, as you said, email by email, day by day, to get improved. And I think gradually we'll find that equilibrium where it all starts to make sense.

Edward Sturm: Oh yeah, that's awesome. Do you have any idea of when identity verification will roll out? That will be a game changer for preventing a lot of spam.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. Right now we already have some initial safeguards in place. So some of the different things that, if you're using the service, you'll start to see is, if you submit a response, you've got to verify the email that you've submitted from. And basically we give you a couple of chances to do that. And if you don't verify your email, then you can't submit responses. And so for anyone using Help a Reporter Out today, if you reply to a reporter's query, you'll immediately get a verification email back that essentially says, hey, verify your email. That enables us to do some additional verification on our side to make sure that this person is who they say they are, and we've got different layers of the product roadmap that we've got to tackle after that.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Not only have I been a source on Help a Reporter Out, I've also been a journalist on Help a Reporter Out. And so I can say, with empathy to the other journalists, when it's bad, it's bad. When you get spam... I mean, and this was before ChatGPT, and with ChatGPT I'm sure it was so much worse. I was just getting a ton of content spinners, just nonstop.

Brett Farmiloe: I think that's one of my biggest surprises, actually. Since we announced the acquisition, and we basically gave it a week to settle before we sent out our first emails today, the inbox is full, full, full with incredible sources from all different types of industries, all different types of backgrounds. There's incredibly reputable PR agencies who are utilizing the service that are well connected to different sources that they represent. And so that's the biggest thing for me. The potential of HARO is tremendous. That's what inspired us to complete the transaction, to revive it, to bring it back.

Edward Sturm: How long ago did you complete that? Sorry for interrupting.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. So we announced it officially on April 15th of 2025.

Edward Sturm: Yeah. Was it a hard process? Did it take a lot, or was it surprisingly easy?

Brett Farmiloe: I don't think that there's ever been a transaction that's been easy. I think that, from what I'll say, we feel very honored that Cision gave us the torch to carry on with HARO. And I think that they didn't make that decision lightly. So, in that regard, we look at it as a testament to us and the team and what we're building, that we get that opportunity to revive Help a Reporter Out.

Edward Sturm: I have to ask, and it's totally fine to say no. Are you able to talk more about the transaction, the process, and what went down?

Brett Farmiloe: Let's do rapid fire. What do you want to know?

Edward Sturm: How much was it?

Brett Farmiloe: Can't tell you that.

Edward Sturm: Okay. All right.

Brett Farmiloe: We haven't disclosed terms. We haven't disclosed some of the assets that were acquired. It's pretty much just everything that we would need to revive the brand.

Edward Sturm: When did the transaction complete?

Brett Farmiloe: That was April 15th.

Edward Sturm: Oh, so you had just announced it on the same day.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. Well, it got completed more towards the end of March, and then we got aligned on the announcement.

Edward Sturm: What's the process been like of getting the assets and reviving it and sending out the emails and doing all of that? Was it easier or harder than you expected?

Brett Farmiloe: I think that it's a little bit of both. It's a pretty straightforward, simple product, where it's an email newsletter that connects sources with journalists. And probably my biggest surprise was the amount of interest that we were able to gather from reporters and journalists. Sourcing is an infinite problem that they face, and any kind of resource that has a value proposition that delivers on that is something that's of interest to reporters and journalists. And so for us, we immediately saw this huge uptake in terms of reporters and journalists who needed to connect with sources and needed that in a pretty immediate fashion. So I think that, in that regard, that was a big surprise for us. Again, the positivity surrounding the revival. There's a lot of people that just gave up once HARO was discontinued. I've heard stories of people shutting down their PR agencies. I've heard of people who have just completely said, hey, once that was gone, I just gave up on trying to get my voice heard in the media. And so I think that opening this door for hundreds of thousands of sources is a tremendous opportunity to once again have your voice heard, elevate your brand, and really be featured online.

Edward Sturm: That actually reminds me. I put out a bunch of notifications to my audience saying you're coming on the show and talking about the acquisition and reviving Help a Reporter Out. And a very consistent question that I received from people, because I have followers everywhere, was: will this work in my country? I'm in Germany. Will this work in Germany? I'm in India. Will this work in India? I'm in Brazil. Can I use this in Brazil? And a lot of people all over the world want to know, can they use Help a Reporter Out, too?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. Right now we're only supporting the English language. So as long as you're submitting a query in English and you meet our criteria to submit a query, then I think you should be good. But we'll figure it out as we go.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, that's what I've been telling people, too. If you're doing marketing in English, or you're doing public relations in English, it's a perfect place to be. So, you said that it shut down because there was too much AI spam. Was that the entire reason?

Brett Farmiloe: Just to clarify on that, I'm not sure why it was discontinued. That was Cision's decision. Just from a lot of the chatter and frustrations that people had voiced, and that we had read about in our due diligence, that seemed to be a lot of the concerns around using a service like HARO: just the fact that people were not helping a reporter at the end of the day, and causing more work and more risk on their side.

Edward Sturm: So first it rebranded to Connectively, and then it stayed Connectively for a year, and then it shut down. Is that correct? They rebranded to Connectively, so they took away a very familiar name that people know and love, and then...

Brett Farmiloe: HARO had a year. April 2024, I think, it got rebranded. December, it got discontinued. And now here we are in April again, 2025, and it's back.

Edward Sturm: What are you most looking forward to with Help a Reporter Out?

Brett Farmiloe: The thing that I've always been passionate about is taking someone with years of hard-earned expertise and experience and giving them an outlet to share it. So it's just amplified with HARO. The fact that we've got hundreds of thousands of different sources who are readily available, at an email, to comment on a story that they're very well qualified to submit for, that's really exciting to me. So amplifying that expertise and allowing voices to be heard across many different diverse spectrums is a mission that we're all getting behind.

Edward Sturm: It's such a valuable platform, and, yeah, thank you. Thank you for buying it. Before you go, I remember when Terkel was rebranded to Featured. Why? This is so long ago. And I love, by the way... I can even remember the UI of Terkel. I think Featured looks very different. Correct me if I'm wrong. And I like the rebrand, but what caused you to do it?

Brett Farmiloe: Well, before we even started the company, I submitted my information for featured.com. It was a domain that was available for sale, and I just blindly submitted through a general contact form. I think three years went by, and then I got a response back: hey, are you still interested in this domain? We're going to sell it. And so at the time we were terkel.io. Terkel was a word that we chose to represent giving voice to the uncelebrated. And so that was kind of the vision and mission behind Terkel. And featured.com was just too descriptive of a word to capture the value proposition that we're delivering, to PR agencies, to in-house marketing teams, to do-it-yourself small business owners, where you could get featured in the media. And so we made the decision to acquire the domain, rebranded to featured.com, and haven't looked back. It was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

Edward Sturm: It was an amazing rebrand. The UI, I still love it. I love how it looks. Actually, you know what? Okay, I have another question. And I've had so many experts on the show answering this in their own ways. I would say I'm kind of an expert in this, and I've answered in my own ways as well. If you are an expert source trying to get accepted by a journalist, do you have any tips for people on how to increase their acceptance rate? And you have so much experience with featured.com now, so you are the person to ask for this.

Brett Farmiloe: I don't even think that my acceptance rate is near yours. 76% is pretty high on Featured. So that's a good rate. I think the biggest thing is, stick to your expertise. If you've got to go to ChatGPT to think about it, if you've got to go to Google Search to research the topic, chances are you're probably not the best fit for that query. But if you're asked a question and you immediately get a response and it's a unique take that not everyone else would have, that's going to be super helpful to a journalist. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. They're writing all these different stories, multiple stories, and it's stuff that they may or may not have expertise about. That's your job, is to provide that added level of expertise so that they could push that story across the finish line and add value to the reader. And so if you're not adding value to the reader, adding value to the reporter, then I would think twice before pressing submit. And for the stuff that you're just like, hey, this is all me, go for it and learn from it and see what gets picked up, and, email by email, response by response, keep it going and have your voice heard.

Edward Sturm: Yeah. The number one thing, I think, is to lead with why you are a credible source. Be brief with that, because these journalists, journalists in general, get so many pitches. But lead with one sentence, just a few words, for why you are the person that the journalist should choose as their expert.

Brett Farmiloe: Absolutely.

Edward Sturm: That's great. How can people learn more?

Brett Farmiloe: You could go to helpareporter.com, enter your email address, and you can get an email every single day from us with the relevant media queries that are there. So that's the easiest way to get started. And then if you're looking to really elevate your game and have more media opportunities hit your inbox, then featured.com is another one, where you could sign up for a free account, submit three answers a month at no cost, and really start to experiment with both platforms to see where you could find your niche and where you can add value. So I appreciate you having me on.

Edward Sturm: Thank you so much. Stick around after this ends, because the video will have to upload. But for everybody watching, listening, this is episode 658 of my daily digital marketing show, The Edward Show. 658 days in a row doing this thing. Thank you. And I will talk to all of you again tomorrow. Bye now.

Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and other PR opportunities. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps publishers fill content gaps with expert insights.