Expert Sourcing After HARO: Qwoted and Featured

HARO is gone, and Cision closed Connectively, its successor, in December 2024. The queries moved to Qwoted, Featured, Help a B2B Writer, SourceBottle and to journalists posting directly under #journorequest on X, Bluesky and LinkedIn. Roughly one response in nine becomes a published quote when the answers come from someone who genuinely does the work. When a shop is answering everything, the rate falls below one in thirty and the quotes land in places you would rather not be cited. What makes a response get used: It arrives within about two hours of the query, it runs under 200 words, and it says something the journalist could not have written themselves. A production director who can explain why a lead time quoted in January is not available in September gets published. A spokesperson repeating what the query already assumes does not. Speed matters because these queries close on first-day replies, so I watch the feeds myself during working hours rather than batching them at the end of the day. The position file: Onboarding produces a document of twenty to thirty things your spokesperson can say first-hand, each with the number or the incident behind it. What actually happened when a mill changed a finishing process. What a certification audit found. Why a customer moved production and what it cost them. Every response I draft comes out of that file, which is why the drafts sound like the person and why I can write them fast enough to matter. We refresh it quarterly, and refreshing it is the part clients find useful independently of any link. What I refuse: No invented statistics. Not rounded, not estimated, not sourced from a competitor's report and restated as ours. No invented titles: if there is no Head of Sustainability, the response does not come from one. No answering queries outside your spokesperson's competence, however attractive the publication — a sourcing director does not have a view on consumer psychology, and a quote proving that will be quoted back at them. No AI-drafted responses sent without your spokesperson reading them, and no responses at all to queries that read like link bait. What is not included: No guaranteed number of placements. No answering finance, crypto or generic business queries because the site has high authority. No paid platforms that sell guaranteed inclusion, which several have started to. No syndication counting: if a piece runs on a network and appears on five regional sites, that is one placement in your report. And no follow-up harassment of journalists who did not use a response — one polite reply, then nothing. Who this is not for: Companies whose only available spokesperson is a marketing manager without operational knowledge. The queries in your category are technical, the journalists are specialists, and a general answer gets discarded silently. Also not for anyone whose approvals take more than a day: the query will be closed. If your legal function must read every quote, we can pre-approve a set of positions during onboarding, but the responses themselves go out the same day or not at all. What you receive: A log of every query answered, the exact text sent, the outlet, and the outcome. Quarterly, an analysis of which query categories converted and which wasted the spokesperson's time, so the next quarter answers fewer and better. In Italy specifically, most of this work still happens by direct relationship rather than platform, so the log includes journalists approached outside the query services.