Reporter Sourcing After the Shutdown of Connectively

Connectively, the platform HARO became after Cision retired the Help a Reporter Out name, shut down on 9 December 2024. Reactive sourcing did not end with it, it fragmented. The requests worth answering in law, recruitment and education now arrive through Qwoted, Featured, SourceBottle, Help a B2B Writer, Muck Rack's request feed and the #journorequest tag on X and Bluesky, and most close inside seventy-two hours. We watch all of them and answer roughly one in twenty. Why one in twenty: A response only works when the person answering has done the thing being asked about. A recruitment client can speak to what happened to time-to-fill across their own placements last quarter. They cannot speak for the national labour market, and a journalist who has read four submissions saying the same general thing will take the one carrying a number and a case. Everything else is volume, and volume is how a spokesperson's name ends up attached to a sentence they would not defend at a conference. The response itself: Two to four sentences. One specific inside it: a figure from your own operations, a decision you can name, something that actually happened. No line about the firm. Marketing sentences are the first thing a subeditor cuts and the link often goes with them, so we do not write them. We draft inside the request window, send to your spokesperson, and need approval back within four hours; past that the request is usually closed. Where the platform offers a bio field, the link goes there rather than in the body, because a link in the body reads as a condition of the quote. Getting your people ready: The first fortnight goes on the spokesperson, not the requests. An hour each to establish what they can say without a compliance check, a written list of the areas where they cannot speak at all, and a media biography carrying the credentials a subeditor needs to run the attribution. Firms with three or more possible spokespeople get a routing rule, so a request never waits on one person's calendar. What we will not do: We will not write an opinion your spokesperson does not hold and put their name on it. We will not answer requests outside the practice areas agreed at the start, however good the outlet looks. We will not pay to have a pitch promoted above other responses on the platforms that sell that. And we do not count syndicated republication as separate placements: one quote picked up by six mastheads off the same wire is one placement in your report. Who this is not for: A firm whose only available spokesperson is the marketing manager. Journalists in these sectors check the byline and the credential, and a comment on employment law from someone who does not practise it will be cut. It is also wrong for anyone expecting a steady monthly count. Reactive volume follows the news: a month with a full bench decision and a bill in committee produces several placements, and a quiet January produces one. Reporting: Each month you get the requests we answered and why, the requests we passed on and why, and published placements with URL, date, whether the link is followed, and whether the quote survived the edit intact. That last column is the one that tells you whether the drafting is working, and it is the reason we keep it.