There are tons, and I am sure that a few weeks worth of research would net me more information and results that I could even read through. I’ve helped build a business or two so I understand the need for policies and on that side of things I can generally respect them, any clearly design policy that helps to protect the business and its consumers I can support. But you need to make that sort of thing known up front. Hiding a policy either good or bad doesn’t make much sense in a world where anything can be spread across twitter in the blink of an eye. Why try to hide something that another party can document and push across the web?
Enough on my ranting, my hearts not in it to be honest. I’m a little disappointed with the folks at Help A Reporter Out (HARO) for hiding a policy that states in order for a query to be ran the page it is going to be published to REQUIRES an Alexa ranking of under 2 million. My little blog here isn’t even close, the site I was going to write the article is a hell of a lot closer, being just over two million. Neither of us can run a query through HARO.
Why is that such a big deal? For me, being a small blog it means that I’m cut off from a valuable resource of data, HARO has a strong subscriber base that I’m blocked from reaching. (Unless of course my Alexa ranking changes) While it’s not the end of the world it does piss me off that they do not disclose this fact upfront. I’ve used HARO for work before and at that time they had a much easier process for submitting queries.
So what are my options? Well, I’ve gone back and forth with the staff their over e-mail and am getting no where.
“Like any company we have rules and regulations and we must enforce them.Your other site still doesn’t meet our Alexa ranking criteria and we require sites to be fully launched before we can run a query.”
Ok, in my book that’s a bit of a bitchy statement. You’re not banning me from a board or giving me a time out. You just won’t let me use your service. My sites not good enough for you, okay fine. But the site I’m writing for is close, and adding a blog into their site would have probably pushed them into the needed range (in my opinion it’s an opportunity that would generate the needed traffic.) BUT since neither of us are good enough, and I feel like I’ve been talking to a snob I’m not really happy with the idea of coming back when I do make the required Alexa ranking. And seeing as I’ve been here for a while and have no intention of leaving anytime soon…well I’m going to do it one way or another.
So instead I pushed my query through a competitor of HARO and so far the feedback hasn’t been what I had hoped. I’ve gotten one reply where with HARO I’d have gotten more. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers in this situation and I’m very happy with the quality of the reply I received.
Am I wrong to be annoyed? Thoughts? Opinions? Words that begin with the letter H? 
