PitchforPR, the un-HARO

(Updated @ 7 a.m. with additional details throughout)

When I first heard about PitchforPR, I was confused. The one week-old online middleman that looks to connect companies seeking publicity for products or services with reporters and bloggers looking for story sources sounded a lot like HARO, Peter Shankman’s well-known matchmaking tool.

A lot of things about PitchforPR and HARO are similar. Both collect queries and aggregate them into email blasts.

But HARO gathers queries from reporters looking for sources for stories they’re working on and sends them to publicists in thrice daily emails.

By contrast, PitchforPR works more like a traditional PR news wire, aggregating requests from companies or professionals with a new product or service they want to get in front of influential bloggers and writers.

Unlike traditional press release services like PRWeb that spew material 24/7, PitchforPR limits the PR blurbs it runs to 10 or 15 in one day. Each day’s email blast focuses on one industry or theme – travel and vacation, baby, music, consumer electronics, etc. The service also limits companies to 350-character releases, forcing publicists to go short on hype, long on details.

But what really sets PitchforPR apart from the PR wires, according to owner Sydnie Suskind, is a short pitch a company or individual can make for up to three areas or subjects where they believe they’d qualify as an expert – a helpful feature for a beat writer or blogger trolling for sources.

The service launched in mid-August and after the first week had signed up 150 subscribers. For now Suskind is sending three email blasts a week, but hopes to increase that to five in the near future.

Suskind, a Los Angeles inventor (she designed an adjustable handbag called the Rappizi), entrepreneur and former freelance writer, says on her blog that she started the service “because I know what it’s like to need PR and not know how to get it… without, of course, spending a fortune on a PR agent.”

Follow Suskind on Twitter at @PitchforPR.