Expert commentary and journalist requests

Lesson 30 of 50Module 6 · Digital PR and earned media6 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

Start with the fact that the brands do not last

For years the default advice in this part of the industry was one word: HARO. Help A Reporter Out was a free email service that sent out reporter queries three times a day, and a great many SEO careers were built on answering them. It was retired and folded into a successor service, Connectively, which has since shut down as well. Neither is operating.

I am opening with that because it is the most important thing to understand about this category. Journalist-request platforms churn constantly. They launch, get overwhelmed by low-quality responses, lose the journalists who made them worth using, get acquired, get folded into a larger product, and close. Any list of active services — including one I could write today — has a shelf life measured in months.

So this lesson is about the category, not a brand. When you need to know what is running right now, search for it, check the date on whatever you find, and verify that the service is actually operating before you build a workflow on it. Ask journalists in your sector what they use; they will tell you, and their answer will be more current than any blog post.

How the model works, and why it degrades

The mechanism is the same everywhere. A journalist writing a story needs a source, a quote or a data point they do not have. They post a request describing what they need, their deadline, and sometimes the outlet. People who think they can help respond. The journalist picks one or two and, if the response is usable, quotes them — usually with a name, a title, a company and sometimes a link.

The reason these services keep dying is a predictable dynamic. A new platform starts with a good ratio of relevant responses to requests, so journalists get value and stay. Word spreads through the marketing industry. Response volume rises sharply, and the proportion that actually answers the question falls. Journalists start receiving dozens of off-topic pitches per request, many of them obviously machine-generated. The value of posting collapses, the journalists leave, and the platform either pivots to a paid product or closes.

Two consequences follow for you. First, a platform is most valuable early, before the ratio degrades — which is an argument for paying attention to new ones. Second, and more importantly, everything you build that depends on a single platform is temporary. The relationships you build with individual journalists are not.

The four skills that transfer to any platform

These are the same wherever the requests arrive — an email digest, a social post, a private database, a direct message from a reporter you already know.

Speed. Requests are often answered within the first hour, because that is when the journalist is actively working on that section of the story. A perfect response sent the next morning competes with quotes the reporter has already pasted in. If you are serious about this, you need the requests reaching a device you check, and you need to be able to write a considered answer in ten minutes.

Answering the actual question. This is where the overwhelming majority of responses fail. The reporter asked something specific. If they asked how small retailers are handling a particular cost increase, they do not want your general thoughts on retail, your company's history, or a link to your blog post about something adjacent. Read the request twice. Answer the sentence with the question mark in it.

Writing something quotable. Give them two sentences that can be lifted into the article without editing. Not a paragraph they must cut down. Not a list of bullet points. Two clean sentences with a point of view, in the voice of a person speaking. If you must add context, put the quotable pair first and the context underneath, clearly separated.

Verifiable credentials. Say who you are, what your role is, and why you specifically know this. Include a link to a page that confirms it — a professional profile, a staff page, a publication record. Fact-checkers verify sources, and a source they cannot verify in a minute gets dropped in favor of one they can.

What a response that gets used looks like

Structure beats eloquence. A usable response reads roughly like this:

Subject line that names the request and your angle in a few words.

One line saying who you are and why you can speak to this: role, organization, and the specific experience that applies.

The quote itself, clearly marked, two sentences, ready to paste.

Optional: two or three lines of supporting context or a relevant figure, with a source.

A direct phone number and an availability window, then stop.

Things that get a response deleted unread: an attachment, a preamble about how much you enjoy the outlet's work, a paragraph of company boilerplate before the answer, an offer to write the whole article, a demand for a link as a condition, and any indication that the text was generated rather than thought about. Journalists have become extremely good at spotting the last one, and it is a large part of why the category degraded.

One more thing worth saying plainly: do not claim expertise you do not have. Answering requests outside your field to collect links is exactly the behavior that ruined these services, and if a reporter publishes you as an expert on something you know nothing about, that is a real problem for both of you.

What you actually get, and what you do not

Set expectations honestly. A successful response typically produces a named mention with a company name attached. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes not, and when there is it is frequently nofollow — which matters less than people assume, for reasons Lesson 6.6 covers in detail. You almost never control the anchor text, the destination page, or whether your quote survives the subedit.

The compounding value is elsewhere. A reporter who used your quote and found you accurate, fast and easy to work with will come back directly, and a direct relationship is worth more than any platform. Being quoted repeatedly in credible outlets also builds the entity associations that matter for both traditional search and AI answer systems, whether or not each individual mention carries a link.

Treat the platforms as a way to meet journalists, not as a link source. Measured as a link source they look mediocre. Measured as a source-relationship pipeline, they are one of the most efficient things available to a small organization with genuine expertise.

Building the pipeline that does not depend on a platform

Everything above is the tactical layer. The durable version is being the person a reporter thinks of without a request being posted at all.

• Be findable. A page on your site that says exactly what you can comment on, in the words a journalist would use, with a direct contact route. Lesson 6.5 covers what that page needs.
• Follow the beat. Know the five or ten reporters who cover your subject. Read them. When they get something right that others got wrong, say so — briefly, with no ask attached.
• Answer when it does not benefit you. Reporters remember the source who helped on background, explained something technical for free, and pointed them to a better source. That memory is the asset.
• Be reachable. A mobile number that gets answered beats every other differentiator in this discipline. Deadlines do not accommodate your calendar.
• Widen the surface. Podcasts, conference panels, industry newsletters and specialist forums all put your name in front of people who write. They convert slowly and they compound.

Build that and the disappearance of the next platform is an inconvenience rather than the end of your commentary program.