Journalist query sourcing for a named expert on your team

Connectively, which is what HARO became, closed in December 2024. Anyone still selling you a HARO retainer is selling a subscription to a dead inbox. The work survived the platform and now runs across Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle, the request feeds journalists post directly on X and Bluesky, and the trade desks I already have numbers for. It is harder than it was in 2021, because every query now receives forty replies written by a language model within four minutes of landing, and reporters have adapted by ignoring anything that reads like one. What actually gets quoted: A number only you hold, attached to a person who will take the follow-up call. For a hotel operator that is the shift in average booking window by source market, month over month. For an agency it is median days on market in one named district against the same quarter last year. For a furniture brand it is the lead time on made to order upholstery and what changed it. Advice does not get quoted any more. Proprietary figures, stated plainly with the period and sample they cover, still do, because the reporter cannot get them anywhere else and cannot generate them. How the desk runs: Query feeds are filtered to your beats and read every working morning. A pitch goes out inside the hour, under 150 words, opening with the figure, followed by two sentences of interpretation the reporter can quote whole, then the spokesperson's name, title and a phone number that is answered. I write from a recorded interview with your expert, they approve before anything is sent, and their name goes on it. I will not attribute a quote to a founder who has never read it. Journalists in these verticals call back, and being caught once ends the relationship for both of us. What gets counted: Placements, with the outlet, the date, the quote as published, and whether a link came with it. Many will be nofollow. Some will be a name with no link at all. I count those and argue for them, because a paragraph in a trade title that the buying side of your market actually reads does more than the link attribute suggests, and because unlinked mentions are the raw material for the reclamation work later. If your reporting line requires a monthly count of followed links, this is the wrong engagement and I will say so before you buy rather than after. Not included: Wire distribution. Paid feature placements, including the packages several sourcing platforms now sell as guaranteed inclusion, which are advertising with an editorial typeface. Crisis handling. Media training beyond the interviews needed to write the pitches, though after two months most spokespeople stop needing me for the answer and only need me for the deadline. Who should not buy this: A company with no one willing to have an opinion attributed to them by name. That is a legitimate position and it makes this impossible; the data study is the better route for you. Also anyone whose approval chain takes more than a day. Reporter deadlines in travel and property run at four to twenty four hours, and a pitch approved on Thursday for a Tuesday query is not late, it is irrelevant. And not for a brand that has been in market under six months with no operating history, because there are no proprietary numbers yet to quote.