Journalist Request Sourcing After Connectively Closed

Connectively, which HARO became, shut down on 9 December 2024. The requests did not stop, they scattered, and a good part of the market is still paying somebody to monitor a service that no longer exists. We watch Qwoted, Featured, Source of Sources, Help a B2B Writer, SourceBottle, the request boards inside Muck Rack and Prowly, and the private contributor alerts several trade titles run for their own regulars. Of everything that arrives through those channels for a legal, staffing or education client, roughly one in twenty is forwarded to you. The other nineteen are content mills, unlinked roundups, or questions your expert genuinely cannot answer. The filter is the service: Volume is free and worthless. A request is worth answering when three things hold at once: the outlet has an audience your buyer sits in, the journalist's byline history shows they link sources, and your named expert has actually done the thing being asked about. The second one is checked before every response, in Muck Rack and then by reading that journalist's last five pieces and counting how many sources got a link rather than a bare name. Journalists who never link still get answered when the outlet matters for reputation, and the log tells you which category each response fell into. Response time is the whole game: A good answer sent in ninety minutes beats a better answer sent next morning, because the piece is usually filed the same day. The constraint sits on your side, not ours. We ask for a named expert reachable within four working hours, and we build a pre-cleared position bank on their standing topics so a same-day request does not need fresh legal approval. Where a request falls squarely inside a pre-cleared position, we draft, send and log it under standing approval. Where it does not, it waits for the human. What we will not do: We do not write a quote and attribute it to somebody who did not say it. Every response is drafted from a recorded conversation with your expert, assembled from positions they approved verbatim, or written by them. We do not answer requests outside the expert's competence to catch a link, because that is how a managing partner ends up quoted on a jurisdiction they have never practised in, and it stays retrievable forever. We do not pay to pitch; several platforms now sell sources priority placement in a journalist's inbox, which is a paid link with extra steps. We do not answer roundup farms, and a nofollow mention on a content mill is never counted as a result. Who this is not for: Practices with one spokesperson who is in court, in class or in front of clients all week. The arithmetic does not work. Three-day response times convert close to zero and you would be paying a retainer for a log of missed requests. Also not for anyone who wants the agency to supply the expertise. We can position an expert. We cannot be one. What you get: A positioning brief naming three to five topics your expert may be quoted on and, more usefully, the ones they may not. A pre-cleared position bank reviewed with your compliance function quarterly. Monitoring across the channels above. Drafted responses inside the agreed window. A weekly log of what came in, what was filtered out and why, what was sent, and what ran, with the outlet, the journalist, the link attribute and whether the page is indexed. Out of scope: Proactive story development, original data work and reclamation of existing coverage. Those are separate engagements, and we would rather you bought them separately than have them folded into a retainer where nobody can see which one worked.