Cision is closing its journalism jobs service and has sold its expert enquiry service which it rebranded and then shut down last year.
The media intelligence and communications solutions company said it is concentrating “resources and innovation efforts on its core technology platform strategy” in a press release about the sale of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to US-based Featured.com.
Cision’s journalism and PR jobs service has long been one of the biggest recruitment boards in the industry. It was originally launched as part of Gorkana, which was bought by Cision in 2015.
The page for recruiters on the Cision Jobs website now states that it is closing on 30 April.
Journalism in the UK and elsewhere has faced several years of tough job cuts and recruitment freezes, impacting potential revenue from job advert postings.
Hold The Front Page, which covers the regional press and traditionally brought in a large part of its revenue from job adverts, said in 2023 it was suffering “not just an accelerated decline in the number of jobs, but also a proliferation of free or lower-cost job advertising platforms that do not offer anything like our quantity or quality of news coverage”. It reduced costs and began asking for reader donations as a result.
Jem Collins, director of jobs board and advice site Journo Resources, wrote on Linkedin that “the last few years have been an incredibly tough market and it’s getting harder and harder to work out where the next sale to pay the bills comes from”.
“Cision might technically be our ‘competitor’, but we’re all weaker without competition and it makes it even harder for journalists looking for roles, especially less than a year after Media Beans has disappeared,” she added.
Media request service HARO was originally launched in 2008 in the US, although the UK was its second-largest user base, and acquired by Cision via its merger with Vocus in 2014. Cision rebranded the service into Connectively last year but shut it down in December.
HARO will be revived on 22 April in its original email-based format by which journalists can submit pitches or queries looking for expert responses which will be included in a regular email bulletin to be seen by PR professionals.
Brett Farmiloe, founder of Featured.com which is HARO’s new owner and itself a US-based expert insights platform for journalists, told Press Gazette the emails will be free and supported by advertising.
Journalist query services came into the spotlight last week after Press Gazette reported on the prevalence of “experts” submitting responses who are not who they say they are, whether AI-generated or without the expertise they claim to have. The benefit to them is getting a company name and possibly even a link onto a national newspaper website, resulting in useful SEO signals. Multiple major websites are now deleting or amending articles as a result of quoting dubious sources.
Farmiloe told Press Gazette that Featured.com has a “multi-layered approach to expert vetting – combining AI signals (like content originality, AI headshot image detection, and behavioural patterns) with human review, Linkedin verification, and community reporting.
“For HARO, we’ll carry those safeguards over and expand them further. If a source misrepresents their expertise, sends AI-generated replies, or generally does not help a reporter out with their reply, they’ll be banned. We’re also building in tools for journalists to report bad actors directly.
“Of course, the best guardrail is encouraging journalists to verify the source before featuring them – which is especially hard in a deadline-driven, ‘do more with less’ type of environment – but in order to truly prevent this sort of thing from happening, it needs to be a shared responsibility between the platform, the journalist, and the source.”
Cision chief product officer and head of strategy Jim Daxner said: “Cision confirms that it no longer offers the Help A Reporter Out or Connectively services as part of its product suite. We are focused on advancing our core platforms — CisionOne, Brandwatch, and PRN — which are critical to delivering powerful, integrated communications solutions for our customers.”
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