HARO's logo (HelpAReporterOut.com)

"This gentleman made a mockery of journalism, and he did it for no other reason than to sell his books, " Peter Shankman told The Observer by phone this week. The social media entrepreneur (who believes in "Twitacles”) was talking about Ryan Holiday, American Apparel public relations expert and social media con man. Mr. Holiday's release of his first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, last week coincided with him revealing that he had used Mr. Shankman's service, Help a Reporter Out (or HARO), a clearinghouse for would-be expert sources, to deceive news outlets like MSNBC, ABC, and The New York Times.

"Reporters have had sources for years before HARO," Mr. Shankman told us, explaining his service."They've had sources since journalism was created. What I've done with HARO, and what Vocus, the company that's acquired HARO has done, has made it easier for journalists to find those sources on deadline by creating a system where anyone who has knowledge on anything can offer to be a source on a story. That does not take away the journalistic responsibility of vetting a source." (Mr. Shankman is currently the VP of HARO after selling it to Vocus.)

Unfortunately, journalists under a tight deadline might not always have time to vet sources thoroughly, and Mr. Shankman's services prominently displays a message to PR people:

From The New York Times, to ABC News, to HuffingtonPost.com and everyone in between, nearly 30,000 members of the media have quoted HARO sources in their stories. Everyone’s an expert at something. Sharing your expertise may land you that big media opportunity you’ve been looking for..

Mr. Holiday claims that this courting of public relations creates a perfect environment for "lazy journalists" to get duped, and that this was exactly what Mr. Shankman was trying to exploit when creating the website.

As he wrote in a recent Huffington Post article about the subject:

Yes, HARO is just a service and as the middleman Peter can't be held totally responsible for lazy reporters who don't fact check their sources. But then again, it was being aware of such laziness that likely drove him to create the site in the first place, and THAT is precisely what he exploits as a publicist. And today, it's what makes Peter defend the indefensible monster that HARO has become. He makes too much money from it.

After the news broke on Thursday over at Forbes and became the biggest story on the site (which later took down the post, along with the one Mr. Holiday himself wrote about crazy bloggers the next day), Mr. Shankman angrily railed on his HARO blog:

Let’s be clear: This idiot (Ryan Holiday, the liar,) did this for one reason, and it wasn’t anywhere NEAR as altruistic as “an experiment.” He wrote a book on how to lie and get in the media, and he was promoting it. End of story. Want more proof? You know what this guy did before he wrote this book? HE WORKED FOR TUCKER MAX, the man who’s written multiple books on how to lie to get laid. Enough said.

Except not really. Mr. Shankman then went on to once again to chide reporters who fell for Mr. Holiday's con while using his service.

I stand by this: “As a journalist, it’s always been your job to do your research and check the source, whether you find that source on the street, on Craigslist or on HARO.”

The Society of Professional Journalists tweeted a link to the article with the comment, “Journalists: 1) Crowdsourcing is fine. 2) Fact checking is still a thing. 3) Heard of Google?”

In that regard, Mr. Holiday and Mr. Shankman are in complete agreement (along with Jim Romensko, who told Mr. Holiday the duped reporters got what they deserved.) Mr. Holiday, however, thinks that resources like HARO are as much the problem as the journalists who use the site. In an email to The Observer, he wrote:

If HARO really cared about "helping" journalists, you'd think that efforts like mine to point out the vulnerabilities in the system would be appreciated, even if they are a little embarrassing. The correct response would be to list the new safeguards HARO is putting in place to prevent this from happening. Instead they're circling the wagons, denying they have any responsibility to vet their contributors, and pretending it's all ok. Why? Because HARO depends on this kind of easy, lazy journalism and any safeguards would limit its attractiveness.

Literally ANYONE can sign up for an account and be a source. Do journalists know this? I could sign up for a new account under a fake name tomorrow and HARO wouldn't care the least. (nor could they stop me)

I may have lied to some reporters to prove my point, but at least I'm not lying to myself the way these journalists and publicists are: there is no way around it, HARO is icky and bad for the news.

But then again, why should we trust Mr. Holiday's claims of altruistic intent? After all, he IS a self-proclaimed "media manipulator," and the truth isn't so black and white. In the case of some of the stories Mr. Holiday chose to become an "expert" in, there was essentially no way he could be vetted: He was quoted in the Times article claiming to be a record collector, when in fact, as he told The Observer, he didn't even know what an LP was. He replied to an MSNBC pitch on HARO asking "HAVE YOU BEEN THE VICTIM OF GERM WARFARE?" with this hilarious e-mail:

My name is Ryan Holiday and I'm the Director of Marketing for the LA-based
clothing company American Apparel. I am also a germ warfare survivor.

I'm young (24) but I've worked my share of crappy, wage-labor jobs. At one,
a Burger King in Sacramento, CA, where I worked during high school, I made
an enemy out of a line cook. He was a tall, rangy kid from another local
high school -- Shaggy we all called him. Shaggy and I liked the same girl.
She chose me, etc., etc. Anyway, one day Shaggy shows up to work sniffling.
I didn't think much of it. I avoided him, he avoided me. At one point, late
in our shift, he calls me over. He says, "Hey Ryan, come here. I got
something to show you." So I wander over, because I'm curious.

I get there and he's holding something in his right hand. It's cupped, so I
can't see what it is. Turns out it was one of those small packets of
pepper. Shaggy opened the pepper, snorted the contents, and then sneezed
directly in my face. Just all over my face. Big, phlegmy chunks of flu in
my hair, on my nose, some even got in my mouth. I rushed him, because it
was an obvious attack -- germ warfare. Several employees held me back. I
quit on the spot. I haven't been back to that Burger King or seen Shaggy
since.
Would love to talk more!
Ryan Holiday

The story made it into the MSNBC piece, though it was removed when Mr. Holiday exposed his con. Mr. Holiday used his real name, his real age, and his real job. He told The Observer that he even once knew a guy named Shaggy. This human interest story would have been almost impossible to fact-check. (Though neither does it really count as "germ warfare.")

As for Roy Furchgott, the young man who wrote The New York Times piece about turntables and record-collecting, well, he's not going to be talking about his experience anytime soon. When reached for comment, he advised us to first contact the Times’ PR department. They replied via email, saying that Mr. Furchgott wouldn't be available for comment, and:

Our fact-checking process is already quite vigorous. While we have no written guideline that would say specifically to verify a source like these online "experts," it is one of those givens that fall under the broad guidelines of the 1999 Newsroom Integrity Statement and the ethics handbook. The freelancer who made this error has been reminded of these policies.

So what have we learned here? That the Internet has made it easier for people like Mr. Holiday lie to journalists? Is that the lesson? Because if so, The New Yorker was already way ahead of the HARO-gate:

You've been warned.

This is how he describes the entrepreneur's lifestyle: "I’m going to work 50 times as hard as any of my friends who have a 9-5 job, I’m not going to sleep. Basically, any time I have sex, it’s going to be with my BlackBerry by my side," he told to a crowd of well-dressed businessmen and women gathered for an all-day series of panel discussions for Entrepreneur Week. Everyone giggled.

“You’re all laughing," he said. "But you’re like, ‘He’s right.'"

Mr. Shankman was invited to NYU to deliver a keynote speech titled: “It’s not web 2.0. It’s not web 3.0. It’s simply life.” His main points on building a business? Be more transparent, keep your message short, stay relevant to your audiences and get on Facebook and Twitter—and actually use them.

“You know what my morning is?” Mr. Shankman asked. “I get up a half an hour early, I get up, go downstairs, make coffee—best thing in the world—I go down in the living room, push a ridiculously obese cat off my laptop, open up the laptop, go to Facebook and all the profile pages of people who have birthdays and write something to them."

Mr. Shankman said this is the modern-day practice of what IAC’s Barry Diller’s did to build relationships in the media business: Pull out his Rolodex and call 10 people a day, just to say hi. Now, according to Mr. Shankman, you can poke people on Facebook instead.

“We interact with an average of 3 percent of our network, which means that 97 percent of the people we connect with on Facebook we do not give a crap about and it’s very true,” Mr. Shankman said. “You add people on Facebook when you’re drunk. You follow people on Twitter because they’re at the bar and they look cute and the next morning they don’t look so cute and we don’t care about them. But right now top-line presence is very easy to do because of Facebook.”

It’s no surprise that Mr. Shankman is a mini-cheerleader for Facebook, if only because he started his free Help a Reporter Out service on the site. Each day Mr. Shankman pings out three emails, each with 30 to 50 questions from journalists seeking experts and sources. Small businesses and PR professionals who have opted in for the service can get back to the journalists directly. It started as a Facebook group in November 2007 and now has its own Web site with 75,000 members. Help a Reporter Out is also “approaching” $1 million in revenue, according to Mr. Shankman, thanks to the ads embedded in the emails. (Sorry, Profnet!)

Mr. Shankman said he became “that guy” that reporters went to find sources because “I just talked to everybody,” he said. He often describes himself as having attention deficit disorder. But one of his clients, a scientist at NASA, said he really has A.D.O.S. “I had never heard of that before, what is that? He said that’s even worse, that stands for Attention Deficit—Oh, Shiny!”

But most of those oversharing, A.D.D.-addled folks on Twitter and Facebook are still using these social networking tools to just make noise—not necessarily build relationships, Mr. Shankman said. “Right now, social networking is just the ability to screw up to a much larger audience in a shorter amount of time,” he said. “Don’t believe me? Take five shots of Jack and Twitter something.”

“The concept of not being found out anymore is going away,” he said. He mentioned Facebook applications that use facial recognition software to automatically detect and tag friends in photos or videos you upload to Facebook from a party. “A little scary, isn’t it?” Mr. Shankman said. “You know what that does? It kills cheating.”

“That’s what’s happening now. But what it’s going to become is a way for everyone to communicate better with everyone else.”

People are already building their networks simply to get recommedations on where to travel or what restraurant to try out in real time—which makes big media recommendations irrelevant, according to Mr. Shankman. “The newspapers that are dying—they’re not all dying as fast as we think they are—but the ones that are dying are being bled to death by the restaurant reviewers, by the movie critics, by the film critics, the theater critics because we don’t need to know their information anymore because our trust is in our circle of friends on Facebook and Twitter,” Mr. Shankman said. “That’s our circle of trust that we’re starting to listen to more and more.”

“We are now in a society where we sit and we have more ways to talk about ourselves than ever before,” he said. “The problem is, is that we are now a society that no longer knows how to listen. Every single waking minute, tweeting about how we’re doing, what we’re doing.”

Beth Schoenfeldt, co-founder of Collective-E, a resource for women entreprenuers, said she was “tweeting” his talk. “I would hate to think that something I said wasn’t being live-tweeted, what’s the point of saying it otherwise?”