It’s been a while since I’ve typed that. The holidays, kids home from college, catching up on work, yadda yadda. That’s all behind me, and I’ve actually had a chance to do some extracurricular reading.

Here’s the best stuff I came across this week:

A Narrowed Gaze (Columbia Journalism Review) – Former Wall Street Journal staffer Dean Starkman examines business journalism leading up to the financial crisis and asks – to paraphrase Jon Stewart of all people – “How could so many journalists covering a beat so closely miss something so big so completely?” Good question. Starkman is writing a book on the subject, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: the Financial Crisis and the Financial Press, due out in fall 2012. Looking forward to it.

How One Bit of Stupidity Could Have Brought Down a Multi-million Dollar Media Company (Shankman.com) – Beware – or be aware of – airplane seatmates. On a plane ride from Florida to NYC, P.R. guy Peter Shankman sat next to a guy whose reading material for the flight was a prospectus for a well-known media company that’s apparently for sale. Shankman doesn’t say which one – but he got an eyeful, and even snapped photos of the prospectus, which he includes with the post (with incriminating material redacted). His lesson: when it comes to confidential information, don’t be stupid. My takeaway as a reporter: be aware of your surroundings, you never know when you might stumble onto the makings of a great scoop.

Unbroken - I’m finally getting around to reading Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of 1936 Olympic standout and World War II hero Louie Zamperini, her follow up to bestseller Seabiscuit. I’m about a third of the way through the book, which showcases the meticulous research and recreation of detail that has become Hillenbrand’s hallmark. Last night I left “Zamp” and two other men in shark-infested waters – can’t wait to see what happens next.

And some industry news:

Can newspapers be tech incubators? (GigaOm) – Why yes, they can, and are, Mathew Ingram writes. He cites the Philadelphia News Network, which just launched the Project Liberty incubator, and Digital First Media, which owns the Detroit News, Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, which has created a venture capital arm to invest in media startups. Another example: the Oregonian announced today partnerships with 50 Oregon blogs, part of a year-old Oregon News Network community blog project. New bloggers run the gamut from birding to local economics.

NewsRight: a Game Changer for Online Journalism? (Mashable) - Associated Press, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and more than two dozen other news organizations have started a digital licensing service to “provide authorized access to the best original reporting and related analytics for convenient use across digital platforms.” According to Mashable’s report, the company’s technology will track “websites, blogs and other Internet aggregators to measure the spread of its participants’ content.” In other words, they’re making sure content aggregators, HuffPost and anybody else aren’t ripping off and using what isn’t theirs without paying for it (my analysis).

Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter (Journalism.co.uk) – A nifty tool for creating beautiful interactive timelines.

Meanwhile, reporters and freelance writers continue to rely on HARO when they’re searching for story sources. I thought it would be helpful to share tips for getting the most out of HARO queries that Shankman walked me through when I interviewed him last week.

Here are Peter Shankman’s secrets for getting the most out of HARO:

1. Fill out the query form completely. Forms with missing data are flagged for review, which  means your query could go out later than you anticipated.

2. Make queries extremely specific. Not just extremely specific “ridiculously specific, obscenely specific,” Shankman says. The more specific you are, the more potential sources will know about what you’re looking for and whether they’re a match.

3. Keep queries short. HARO’s query form doesn’t have a maximum word count, but write too much and you risk potential sources not reading through the whole thing, Shankman says.

4. Include the name of the publication. Some newspapers and magazines don’t like staff writers or freelancers to reveal the name of the publication in their queries, for competitive or other reasons. But if they don’t, they risk having sources ignore them, Shankman says. His experience has shown that including the publication’s name works in a writer’s favor. “The ones from big outlets tell us when they include their media outlet they get 10 times the results as when they don’t,” he says. Some PR departments or agencies who track HARO queries for their companies or clients won’t respond to a request if they don’t know where it’s coming from, says Frank Strong, a Vocus spokesman who participated in the interview. “I am always hesitant when I see an unnamed publication, because you don’t know who it is you’d talking to, what their credibility is or who’s are the people behind it,” he says.

5. Fudge the query deadline. Yes, that’s right, the founder and manager of HARO suggests that writers cheat on the date by which they need to hear from sources. “Don’t put down the deadline of when your story’s due, but the deadline by which you want responses,” Shankman says. And if you’re on deadline, mark your query as urgent and HARO could end up sharing it on Twitter.

6. Don’t ask for free stuff. To keep amateurs and unscrupulous characters from misusing the service, HARO’s staff flags queries that include requests for free products or services, such as computer or video gaming equipment. You may review products for a computer magazine for a living and have a 100 percent legitimate reason for making such requests. But know that if you do, your query could undergo additional scrutiny, which could delay when it’s circulated.

7. Flag HARO staff about off-topic pitches. HARO’s source network now numbers more than 150,000, and writers I’ve heard from before and after Monday’s HARO post came out have said they’re getting more spam than ever, something they attribute to HARO but Shankman and Strong adamantly deny. According to Shankman, the best mechanism for policing sources who respond to queries with off-topic pitches or spam is to send an email to flag@helpareporter.com with the particulars of the situation. First offenses merit a warning; if they continue, HARO could ban an individual or the agency they work for. “There are two PR firms that can’t use HARO. It’s been that way from the beginning,” he says.

8. Manage your expectations. Although HARO has 150,000 sources, 75 percent of them are small businesses. If you’re looking for a source on an esoteric academic subject, HARO might not be the best place to find a source. “It’s a numbers game” like any other avenue you use to find sources, Shankman says. “If you want someone who’s visited New York it’s one thing, but if you want a biochemist who works with heavy metals you won’t get that many. In that case, you might be better off using ProfNet,” HARO’s more academically-inclined competitor.

Do you have your own secrets for getting the most from HARO queries? Please share by leaving a comment.

In June 2010, Peter Shankman sold Help A Reporter Out (HARO), his very popular website that matches reporters’ requests for sources with companies that could provide the information, to public relations software company VOCUS. Ever since, writers have wondered what effect the acquisition has had on the service.

When Frank Strong, a spokesman for the Lanham, Maryland, company commented on a recent post here that mentioned HARO, I took the opportunity to ask for an interview. He agreed and offered to include Shankman on the call.

Since the acquisition, there have been some changes and a lot of growth, but one thing Shankman is adamant about: he may have sold HARO, but he hasn’t sold out the journalists who rely on it. “We have no plans to charge anyone for HARO,” said Shankman, on the call from his office in New York City.

HARO was a hit with reporters almost since the two-year-old service launched. According to many writers, and as testimonials on the site attest, the service did better job of helping them find sources – often on very short notice – and provided a wider variety of sources than its main competitor, ProfNet.

It’s easy to see why Vocus was interested in HARO. Vocus owns PRWeb, a web-based press release service that competes with PRNewswire, which runs ProfNet. Adding HARO to Vocus’ other businesses would make them more competitive.

But lately, not all writers have been happy with HARO. At least a few have complained that queries take longer to post, the individuals or companies that reply to queries aren’t as on target as they used to be, and in some cases,  responses are little more than spam. Given that Vocus sells software to PR firms to manage media contacts and campaigns, some writers have questioned whether the business is using HARO to collect their email addresses and selling them to agencies or other companies to use for email marketing purposes.

The basics of HARO haven’t changed, according to Strong and Shankman. HARO is and will continue to be free for journalists and sources. The service is supported by sponsors who pay $300 to $1,500 to place ads in one of three daily email blasts (some sponsors pay less than that based on volume discounts).

As for collecting and sharing writers’ information? “That question pisses me off,” Shankman says. Most queries are auto-forwarded and sent out with an anonymous email address, so nobody’s looking at them, he says. “Once your deadline is passed, your email dies, and is no longer linked to your account. That prevents you from getting spam from people who try to harvest” email addresses, he says.

The only time a HARO staffer – there are two in addition to Shankman – open queries is if isn’t filled out completely, is for a startup publication they can’t find online, or for a publication with an Alexa ranking above 2 million.

There are a couple other things that would cause HARO to hold or follow up on a query: if the writer is asking for products for free or if they’ve previously misrepresented themselves. “If you’re asking to have the latest gaming system sent to you to review for your blog, it’s not going to happen,” Shankman says. He also recalled an instance when a writer represented him or herself as being with CNN when in fact they were an assistant editor at a CNN affiliate.

What has changed about HARO:

• HARO is growing. Both the number of journalists using it and the individuals or companies that receive its 3X a day email blasts are up 15 percent since the acquisition.
• The number of writer queries has also risen and is now between 70 and 75 per email.
• HARO’s source pool has grown to approximately 150,000 companies, the majority of them small businesses.

The service’s rapid growth is one reason journalists my have to wait longer to see their queries go out, Shankman said. “If we sent out each one (immediately) we’d have 275 queries (per email) and no one would answer,” he says. If you’ve got an urgent deadline, mark your query as urgent, he said. Even if your query isn’t urgent, he suggests including a deadline that’s well in advance of your actual story deadline.

Writers who think they’ve been spammed should alert HARO’s staff by sending an email to flag@helpareporter.com, Shankman says. If HARO receives a complaint from a writer about an off-topic pitch or other problem, the source gets a warning. If problems persist, the source or the source’s agency could be banned from the service. According to Shankman, he’s banned 400 sources from the service in the past two and a half years, including two PR firms that are barred from ever using HARO again.

As far as the future is concerned, after Vocus bought out HARO, the company agreed to maintain the status quo for a period of time before considering making any modifications, Strong and Shankman say. That time has passed, and Vocus and Shankman now are discussing possibilities. While nothing’s set in stone, one they’re considering is adding a premium tier of service over and above the free HARO service. Whatever they end up doing, “We wanted to move methodically and make sure it’s well though out,” Strong says. “We want something that will be consistent with the free HARO.”

Coming on Wednesday: 6 tips for crafting a killer HARO query. Peter Shankman shares tips and tricks that writers can use to ensure they get the bes possible responses to their HARO queries.

I’d put out a call to writers and editors on LinkedIn asking for names of industry folks I should include. But instead of news industry luminaries, I kept getting social media trailblazers. Wait a minute, I wanted to say, you don’t understand – social media isn’t the same as online news.

Then I started using Twitter. It didn’t take long to figure out that for the people who hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other online networks the social media hotdogs and digital media trendsetters are one in the same. They’re the ones people friend, follow and read. They’re the ones broadcasting the news of a US Airways plane going down in the Hudson River and Barack Obama’s inauguration  – regardless of who they are, where they are, their day job, their background or experience.

That meant I had to rethink my definition of trendsetter.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s totally subjective and different from what I would have picked six month ago, and probably what I’d pick six months from now. When possible, I’ve linked their names to their Twitter IDs or websites.

The Old School

• Bill Keller - Executive editor of the New York Times, charged with bringing the Grey Lady into the 21st century. Appointed paper’s first social media editor earlier this week.
• Jonathan Miller – Former AOL chief recently hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.’s digital interests, including MySpace and Hulu (minus the Wall Street Journal).
• Russ Stanton – Los Angeles Times editor. Figuring out a way how to stay relevant – and solvent – in the Internet age.
• Dean Singleton – Head of MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and 99 other media properties, and leader of the charge to help newspapers monetize the Web.

The New Wave

• Tina Brown – Proprietress of The Daily Beast, a cross between the Conde Nast glossies she used to edit and a daily politics and gossip column.
• Arianna Huffington – HuffPost founder; gadfly turned new media publisher.
• Hyperlocal news bloggers – NeighborsGo, NewzJunky, SealBeachDaily.com, WestSeattleBlog, Neighborhood Notes, the list goes on and on
• Josh Marshall – Creator of Talking Points Memo, political blog that won a George Polk Award in 2008 for reporting on the firings of US attorneys.
• Paul Steiger – Former WSJ managing editor and current editor in chief at ProPublica, another high-profile online-only news outfit doing original investigative journalism on a non-profit basis.

The Professors

• Jeff Jarvis – J-school prof at City University of New York, Buzz Machine blogger, author of What Would Google Do? and former magazine and newspaper reporter, columnist and editor.
• Jay Rosen – NYU journalism prof, PressThink blogger and director of NewAssignment.Net, “an experiment in open-source reporting.”
• Sree Sreenivasan – Tech evangelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School, know for his extensive new media workshops.

The Promoters

• Seth Godin – Author, viral marketer extraordinaire, quipster.
• Guy Kawasaki – Entrepreneur, author, social media guru, proprietor of AllTop “online magazine rack” and blogger at How to Change the World. On Twitter at @guykawasaki.
• Peter Shankman – PR guy and founder of Help a Reporter Out crowdsourcing service for reporters.

The Pundits

• Paul Gillin – Social media expert, author and chronicler of newspaper hard times at Newspaper Deathwatch.
• Mark Glaser – Columnist for PBS MediaShift, “Your guide to the digital media revolution.”
• Alan Mutter – Newsman turned venture capitalist and blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
• Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester Research social media analyst.

The Tech Geeks

• Chris Brogan – Mr. Social Media. Read and learn.
• Matt Mullenweg – Founding developer of WordPress blogging software, used by newspapers such as the New York Times, and head of WordPress’ parent company, Automattic.
• Dipchand “Deep” Nishar – Former Google exec who became LinkedIn’s v.p. of products in early December and has since rolled out a bevy of service upgrades.
• Darren Rowse – The Aussie blogging mastermind behind ProBlogger.
• Robert Scoble – Uber tech geek. Former Microsoft tech evangelist and Fast Company videographer blogging at Scobleizer.com.
• Biz Stone and Evan Williams – Co-founder and CEO of Twitter respectively. Reportedly turned down a $500 million buy out offer from Facebook earlier this year.

Know other new media pioneers I should include? Leave a comment. If I get enough I’ll re-post an expanded list.

If you don’t, it might be time to get acquainted. HARO stands for “If I Can Help A Reporter Out.” It was started by a PR guy and networking maven named Peter Shankman as a place reporters can turn to when they’re stuck for sources. Shankman started it as an alternative to ProfNet, which some writers have complained has grown so big the sources it nets aren’t relevant.

For reporters, HARO is easy. You don’t even need to register. Just go to the “Reporter” side of the service, fill out the request form and click “Submit it.” Your query will be included in an emailing of multiple requests for sources that Shankman sends out several times a day to a list of more than 23,000 PR representatives, company executives and other sources.

I’d heard a lot about HARO in recent months but didn’t give it a try until last week when I was hurting for sources for an IT industry story for IncTechnology.com that I was writing at the last minute. So I took the plunge and submitted a HARO request. Within 24 hours, I got about 40+ responses from PR reps, IT consultants and company presidents, etc. By the end of day two, I’d received close to 60.

HARO isn’t just for tech stories. I have freelance friends who write about all kinds of things, from green living to parenting to finance, and they all use it and rave about it. And they’ve been able to track down the hardest sources of all to get – real people.

HARO has grown so popular so quickly, it’s now got some of the same problems that plagued other source-finding services, namely too many off-topic responses, which you can read more about in this post about it on The Renegade Writer blog. Get around that by making sure your queries are as specific as possible. And state up front that people won’t hear from you unless you’re interested in using them.

If you decide to give it a try, I’ve got one more piece of advice: since HARO can result in inquiries from many more sources than you could possibly use, when you fill out the query registration form, give a very short time frame for people to get back to you, such as in 24 yours or less. Otherwise you could get bombarded.

And if you’re a PR person, read these great do’s and don’ts from Susan Johnston’s The Urban Muse blog about using HARO to pitch story ideas to writers.