Journalist Sourcing and Expert Quote Placement Program

Last year the experts we source sent 187 responses to journalist queries and were quoted 54 times, a rate of 29 percent. That is about three responses a month per expert. Shops that answer forty queries a week land a comparable absolute number of citations and spend a year of your engineer's attention getting there. We would rather send three good ones. Where the queries actually are: Connectively and the service it replaced are mostly consumer, personal finance and marketing queries. A plant manager has nothing to say to most of them. The queries that matter for manufacturing, freight and power come from Qwoted, Featured and ProfNet, from the editorial calendars trade publishers post each autumn, and from beat reporters directly once they know your expert exists and answers. We work all of those. The last one produces the citations worth having and takes about two quarters to build. What makes a source get picked: A credential a reporter can verify, and a same-day answer. They do check. A PE licence number, a seat on an ASME or API committee, years running compliance under FMCSA hours-of-service or NERC CIP, a role that plainly explains why this person knows — that is what moves a response out of the pile. Second is speed. Most queries close within 24 to 48 hours and the early substantive answer usually wins. We commit your expert to four business hours during a live query. If that commitment is not real inside your organisation, this does not work and we will say so at the proposal. How we run it: We build a source profile a reporter can verify: photo, a title that is true, the credentials, two prior quotes. We prepare the expert for an hour, mostly on answering the question that was asked and then stopping. We watch the query streams and bring them only what sits inside their discipline. We draft the response in their voice; they edit and approve it; your counsel clears it before it sends if your counsel wants sight of it. Every send and every placement is logged with outlet, URL, link status and date. What we refuse: We do not write quotes for a persona. Every citation carries the name of a real employee who read it and will stand behind it in front of a customer. We do not answer queries outside the expert's discipline, which is where the embarrassing quotes come from; an operations VP opining on tariff policy is how you end up in a story you did not want. And we do not attach a link demand to a pitch. Some placements will not carry a link and we send those anyway, because the reporter relationship is the asset and the link is a by-product of it. What you receive: The source profile, the preparation session, monitored query streams across the networks above, drafted responses inside the response window, and a placement log with URLs and link status. On the ongoing engagement, a quarterly review of which beats are converting and which expert to add to the bench. Not included: Press release distribution. Podcast and speaking bookings. Crisis response — if reporters are already calling, you need a crisis firm today, not a sourcing programme. Who this is not for: Companies whose subject-matter expert cannot answer inside a business day, or whose communications review takes three. Deadlines do not move for your approval chain. Also not for anyone who wants a guaranteed monthly citation count. We will tell you the rate we have seen and decline to promise past it.