Journalist request platforms

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

What this category is - and why no platform name is safe to learn

A journalist request platform is a service that collects queries from reporters who need a source and distributes them to people who might answer. The reporter writes something like "Looking for a small business owner who switched payment processors in the last year, deadline 5pm." You reply with a usable quote. If the reporter uses it, you get named, and often linked.

Start with the fact that matters most: Help a Reporter Out - HARO - has shut down, and so has Connectively, the service that replaced it. For roughly fifteen years HARO was the default answer to "how do I get quoted", and an enormous amount of published advice still assumes it exists. It does not. Its successor did not last either.

That is not an aside; it is the defining characteristic of the category. These platforms churn constantly. They get acquired, they get folded into a parent product, they introduce paid tiers, they get overrun with low-quality responses until journalists abandon them, and then they close. New ones launch to fill the gap, some free, some subscription, some run inside social platforms, some operating as private lists a single publication maintains.

So do not trust any list of platforms, including one you read here. Before you invest time, verify what is actually operating right now: search for what journalists in your sector currently say they use, check whether the service's own site and social accounts have been updated recently, and confirm that queries are still flowing. Learn the skill described below. It transfers to whatever the next platform is called.

How it works, step by step

1. Find what is currently active. Ask journalists you already know. Watch the hashtags reporters use to source contributors on whichever social platform your sector's press lives on. Check whether trade bodies in your industry run their own source lists - these are quiet, low-competition, and durable.
2. Filter ruthlessly. Most queries are not for you. Set up filters or a saved search for the two or three subjects where you are genuinely credible, and ignore everything else. The temptation to answer adjacent queries is where this tactic goes wrong.
3. Read the query twice. Note what is actually being asked, the deadline, the publication, and any stated requirements - some reporters specify they will only use sources with particular credentials or locations.
4. Respond fast. Speed is the single largest controllable variable. Reporters working to a deadline typically read responses in order and stop once they have enough. Being in the first handful matters more than being the most eloquent.
5. Answer the question that was asked. Not the adjacent question you would rather answer, and not a pitch for your product.
6. Be quotable in two sentences. Give a self-contained quote the reporter can paste without editing. Then, below it, offer more detail if wanted.
7. Provide verifiable credentials. Full name, exact title, organization, a link to a page that proves you are who you say, and a contact number. Reporters at real publications check.
8. Follow up once, after publication. If you are quoted without a link, a short, polite note asking for attribution to your site succeeds often enough to be worth sending.

What it costs in time and effort

The cost is not money; several credible options in this category have historically been free, and the paid ones are usually priced as a modest subscription. The cost is attention, spread thin, indefinitely.

Queries arrive on the reporter's schedule, not yours. A useful query might land at 8am with a noon deadline. To convert at any meaningful rate, someone has to be watching, and that someone has to be the expert - if the query goes to a marketing coordinator who then has to schedule time with the expert, who then has to approve the quote, the deadline is gone.

Realistically this is fifteen to thirty minutes a day of scanning, plus twenty minutes to write a good response when something matches. The conversion rate is poor by design: the majority of responses are never used, and a good hit rate is a small fraction of what you send. Which means the honest cost model is a persistent low-grade tax on an expensive person's time, in exchange for occasional links you could not have bought.

One important asymmetry: the cost per response falls sharply once you have a stock of prepared material. An expert with three or four written positions on their core subjects, plus a ready bio and headshot, can answer in five minutes. Most of the effort in this tactic is spent on the first month.

When it works and when it does not

It works when you have a real, checkable expert, when your subject is one journalists write about regularly, and when you can respond within the hour. It works particularly well for niche technical expertise, because the pool of people who can answer a specialist query is small and reporters are grateful.

It does not work in these cases, and no amount of persistence fixes them:

• You have no credential. "Marketing manager at a company that sells the product" is not a source; it is a vendor. Reporters filter these out.
• You want volume. This tactic produces a trickle. If your plan requires dozens of links a quarter, this is not the mechanism.
• You cannot move fast. A one-day internal approval process means you will miss essentially every query worth answering.
• You are outsourcing the answers. Agencies that write responses on behalf of clients produce recognizable filler, and reporters who have been burned once stop reading that sender.

There is also a quality warning. Because these platforms are open, they attract link sellers who answer everything, and journalists respond by tightening filters or leaving. The platform you join today may be materially worse in six months. Judge it by whether you are getting used, not by how many queries it sends you.

Common mistakes

• Answering queries you are not qualified for. The most damaging habit in this tactic. It wastes your time, wastes the reporter's, and gets your address ignored.
• Writing an essay. A 600-word response is a request that the reporter do editing work for you. Two tight sentences, then optional depth.
• Burying the quote. Do not open with three paragraphs about your company. The usable quote goes in the first lines.
• Vague credentials. "Industry expert with over a decade of experience" tells a reporter nothing they can verify or print. Give the title and the organization.
• Pitching the product. The link is your payment for being useful. Asking for it inside the answer usually costs you both.
• Treating a shut-down platform as live. A surprising amount of agency work still budgets time against HARO. If a proposal you are reading mentions HARO or Connectively as active services, the proposal was not written this year.
• Not tracking outcomes. Without a log of what you sent and what ran, you cannot tell whether a platform is worth the daily attention it is consuming.

A worked example

A query arrives from a personal finance reporter: "Need a mortgage broker to explain why applications get declined at the final stage. Two or three sentences. Deadline 3pm today."

A weak response opens with the firm's history, explains that the firm has helped thousands of clients, offers to "jump on a call", and closes with a request for a dofollow link to the homepage. It arrives at 4pm.

A strong response arrives at 11am and reads roughly like this. Subject line: "Mortgage broker - why applications fail at final underwriting." Then the quote, ready to paste: a specific, concrete explanation naming the two or three things that most often surface in a final check and why they surface then rather than earlier. Then one line offering a further paragraph on how applicants can pre-empt it, if useful. Then the credentials block: full name, exact title, firm, regulatory registration number if the sector has one, direct phone, and the URL of the biography page on the firm's site.

Notice what the strong version does not contain. No attachment. No company boilerplate. No request for a link. No offer to "provide more information about our services." It gives the reporter a finished component of their article and a way to verify the person who wrote it. That is the entire skill, and it is why it survives every platform closure.

How to measure it

Keep a simple log with five columns: date, platform, query subject, publication, and outcome. Outcomes are one of used-and-linked, used-unlinked, or unused. That log answers every question worth asking.

The metrics that matter are hit rate (responses used, divided by responses sent), link rate (linked mentions divided by used mentions), and cost per placement expressed in expert-hours rather than money. If hit rate is falling on a platform, either your responses have got worse or the platform has degraded; the log tells you which, because a stable hit rate elsewhere points at the platform.

Do not measure this tactic on referring domain count alone. A meaningful share of successful placements are unlinked mentions, which are worth reclaiming and which increasingly carry weight in their own right as evidence that a real, named person exists and is treated as a source. Track those separately rather than writing them off.

Finally, apply the same durability lens used elsewhere in this reference. Editorial links decay: on a twenty-year natural profile, the median referring domain stopped linking after 1,080 days, and 97.4% of losses happened while the source page was still live. A quote in a news article is exactly the kind of link that disappears in a redesign or a content prune. Measure your annual run rate, not your all-time total.

The verdict

This is one of the few genuinely accessible ways for a small organization to earn links from publications with real editorial standards, and it costs nothing but attention. If you have a credible expert who can write a clean quote inside an hour, it belongs in your program.

Two conditions, though. First, do not build a process around a named platform, because this category churns harder than any other in link building - HARO ran for years and is gone, its successor is gone, and whatever you are using today has a finite life. Build the process around the skill: watch for queries, respond fast, answer what was asked, be quotable in two sentences, prove who you are. Second, do not expect volume. This is a trickle tactic that compounds into something more valuable - a track record of published quotes that makes you the person a reporter contacts directly, at which point you have moved from chasing queries to expert commentary, which is a much stronger position.

Verify what is currently operating before you commit any time. Any list, mine included, is out of date the week after it is written.