Expert Sourcing and Journalist Requests, Post-Connectively

The platform this service is named after no longer exists. Connectively, the product Cision built to replace HARO, shut down on 9 December 2024. Expert sourcing kept working, it simply moved. A skincare or apparel brand with one genuinely qualified spokesperson can still expect roughly eight to twelve on-beat requests a week across what remains, and we file three or four of them. Where the requests come from now: Qwoted and Featured carry most of the US consumer volume. ResponseSource covers UK trade and national desks and is where an apparel brand selling into Britain should be. Help a B2B Writer matters if you sell wholesale or run a marketplace. SourceBottle covers Australia and New Zealand. Beyond the platforms, a growing share of requests never reaches one: reporters post them on Bluesky and X, or send them to a beat list out of Muck Rack. We watch all of it, and a fair number of the placements worth having come from the unplatformed half. Your expert, not ours: This requires a real person with a real title who will stand behind a quote. A founder, a formulator, a head of merchandising, a customer service lead who has read forty thousand complaints. We do not write quotes for an invented expert, we do not attribute a statement to someone who does not hold the qualification it implies, and we will not put your marketing manager forward as a dermatologist. What we need from that person is about thirty minutes a fortnight, usually as voice notes answering our questions, and we draft from those. What a response looks like: Filed inside the deadline, which is often four hours and is the single biggest reason responses fail. Under two hundred words. One specific claim the reporter cannot get from a press release, with a number or a mechanism in it. No link request in the body, no bio block, no attachment. If a request asks for something your expert does not actually know, we do not answer it, and that accounts for most of what we decline. Claims we will not make on your behalf: Anything that reads as a treatment claim for a cosmetic. FTC health claims guidance applies to a quote in an article the same way it applies to your own product page, and a reporter's copy is not a shield. We will not say a serum treats a condition, we will not cite a study your brand did not run as though it were yours, and we will push back when a team asks for language its own regulatory reviewer has already refused elsewhere. Volume is not the metric: Response counts are the wrong report and we do not send one. We track which publications quoted your expert, whether the quote survived the edit intact, and whether the second request from the same reporter arrived without a platform in between. That last figure is the point of the exercise. The goal is a place on a reporter's own contact list, after which the platform stops mattering. What this does and does not produce: Links, sometimes. Several titles quote sources without linking as house policy, and that is worth knowing before you buy. What it reliably produces is a presence inside coverage your buyers already read, and the reporter relationships that press campaigns then run on. Who this is not for: Brands whose only available spokesperson is an agency account manager. Teams that cannot clear a quote inside a business day, because approval latency kills this work outright. And any brand hoping for a quote inserted with a keyword-rich anchor, which is not something a journalist will do and not something we will ask for.