Help a Reporter? Sure, but How about Some Back?

by Scott Jangro on October 20, 2009


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Our halloween costume website has received a few press mentions so far this season, thanks to having a PR person on the case and resources like HARO (Help a Reporter, great service from Peter Shankman, check it out.)

It’s exciting to see our name in print, and I know that every press mention is a great benefit to our business and brand. But at the risk of being accused of looking a gift horse in the mouth, I’m going to gripe for a minute here in hopes that awareness will improve the HARO information economy.

And here it is:

Is it me or are newspaper websites way stingy with their links?

Like this one:

Staten Island Advance – HOMEMADE HALLOWEEN DECK: Scare up some savings this holiday by with these do-it-yourself children’s costumes

HOMEMADE HALLOWEEN DECK_ Scare up some savings this holiday by with these do-it-yourself children_s costumes - SILive.com.png

This is a great article, and some good coverage for us (and I’m not complaining about that.) But wouldn’t it be useful to their readers to be able to click through on just one of the mentions of the website talked about in the article? They literally suggest that their readers go check out a website but they have to type in the URL.

Quid Pro Quo

I’m not pretending for a minute that I’m just looking out for the readers. Of course I’m interested in getting a link from a newspaper. Because that’s a REALLY good link. But that’s just the point. A newspaper felt that we were cool enough to talk about us, but from a search engine “PageRank” and “TrustRank” perspective it’s lost.

This is what is in it for me.

I realize that the newspapers don’t care about this, but they need to. I spend a good amount of time on the phone with reporters and even follow up with information, photos, etc. They get some pretty great articles (I hope they think so), some quotes, and some fun stuff to share with their readers.

I really don’t want much in return. Just a little link.

Otherwise, HARO becomes less cool.

Learn From the Good Ones

They’re not all bad. Here’s a great one:

Boston.com – Trick or Treat Deals

Trick-or-Treat Deals - Bargain Bin - Boston.com.png

And here’s the best one ever: Hurricane Hannah (a few years old.)

What’s ironic is that Time.com and Boston.com reporters surely have people falling at their feet. And somehow they manage to give a good experience to their readers AND give something to the website that helped make the story.

Thank you Time.com and Boston.com. I’m sure your readers thank you too.

I’ll happily HARO you any time!

  • Scott, I think that reporter did not want to appear as endorsing the product and was afraid FTC will come ofter his dupa ;)
  • Thanks for the comment merck.

    "Just be happy with the visibility" is getting pretty old as newspaper subscription rates are at record lows. But as I said, I am happy with that. That's a cool thing. I'm not "just" happy with because I think that the journalism industry is ignoring something important.

    There is a link economy that Google and the search engines have created and that we all live in. The way my website can rise above the others is from other websites linking to it in a way that gives it credibility. This newspaper story is credibility, but the lack of a link prevents me from getting benefits in that economy.

    I'm just sharing with you the relative worth I put on the type of visibility we get from the press. Ignoring the benefits that website owners see in a hyperlink is important.

    It's the web equivalent of not citing the source of a quote, and just like if you persistently failed to quote people, they care less about talking to you.
  • merck
    With a journalism degree and about a decade's worth of time since graduating, I suppose I can chime in here. While I don't work in the industry anymore - the Web holds way more opportunities than the pittance journalists get - I do have intermittent contact with former colleagues.

    A few weeks ago, I spoke to the former business editor of a major daily newspaper. He was building a site and unsure of the importance of keywords to today's journalists. Had I not asked whether the paper demanded keyword relevance for their web-based content, I would assumed that they all knew.

    So that's just keywords.

    Furthermore, other dailies are knowledgeable about keywords and links but have editorial policies - currently very meager - about the issue.

    But you're right about the gift horse: just enjoy the visibility. If folks are interested, they'll visit. I'd rather get highly targeted visits than PR.
  • FYI, from having been responsible for the article writing (for newspapers) and managing the online portal, it's usually 2 separate teams of people working on the writing and the webmastering.

    I've had to manually clean up and process 200+ articles in a .brs or .txt file into a .html file, and the priority was having the stuff come out quickly and cleaning up any formatting anomalies along the way. Graphics and linking out usually wasn't the priority (even though it might be pretty easy to add a macro then added a "<a href=http://..." into the mix.

    In my opinion, it's more the fault of the process, and educating the industry vs the reporter being able to embed links into the article when they submit (which might mess up the formatting for the print editing) as it goes to whatever layout software they might be using.
  • You should take her to see their farm team next season to make up and get a link in 2010: http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?si...
  • I wonder if it's just a case of laziness - are you seeing them include some links, but not for all URLs?

    Or maybe the Staten Island paper didn't want to give link love to a Sox/Pats fan.
  • Oh, and I did give her shit about the Yankees. Think that had something to do with it?
  • Based on my unscientific sampling, there are no links at all. Therefore, I tend to think that they write for print and don't give it a second thought.

    I'm sure the reasons are varied though.
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