How journalist request platforms like HARO and Qwoted work, and what they cost

Founders who want a quote in a major outlet without hiring an agency often start with a journalist request platform: a service where reporters post what they need and experts pitch themselves directly. For most of the past decade, that market was synonymous with one name, HARO, Help a Reporter Out. That brand has since been shut down, sold, relaunched and rebranded, and a handful of paid competitors have built structured query marketplaces around the same idea. Anyone weighing a do-it-yourself pitching strategy needs to know which version of these platforms exists today, what it costs, and what a journalist expects in return for using a source's quote.

How a query-matching platform works

Query platforms flip the usual pitching process. Instead of an executive or publicist emailing a reporter cold, a journalist posts a request describing the story and the kind of source needed, and experts who match the topic submit a pitch directly inside the platform. Connectively, the platform-based product Featured runs alongside the email-based HARO, describes the mechanism this way: experts browse opportunities, filter by topic and outlet, and submit pitches directly within the platform, while publishers receive ready-to-publish insights from vetted experts.

That structure removes the need to find a journalist's email address or guess at their beat, but it does not guarantee a response. Reporters still choose which pitches to use, decide how much of a quote to run, and are under no obligation to credit a source's company or title the way the source wrote it.

Why HARO disappeared and came back under a new owner

HARO launched in the United States in 2008 and built its largest following there, with the United Kingdom as its second-biggest user base. Cision, the media-intelligence company that came to own the platform, rebranded it Connectively, then shut the platform down in December 2024. The company said it wanted to concentrate on its core platforms — CisionOne, Brandwatch and PRN — rather than keep running a separate journalist-request network.

Four months later, Cision sold the HARO name and platform to Featured.com. Featured relaunched the service on April 22, 2025, reverting to the original, no-login email format, free and funded by advertising. Featured's founder and chief executive, Brett Farmiloe, said the rebuilt version would add vetting to combat fake sources and AI-generated responses, a problem that had spread across query platforms as pitching became easier to automate.

Where Connectively stands now, as a platform separate from HARO

In 2026, Featured.com revived Connectively as a separate, platform-based product under the brand and web address Cision had used, migrating in a system it had already been running for more than four years, with every media opportunity, profile, subscription and workflow carried over. A June 2026 announcement said Connectively had surpassed 100,000 users and now works with roughly 2,500 publishers looking to fill content gaps with expert-sourced quotes, connecting an expert with a publisher on average every six seconds. Connectively operates alongside the email-based HARO that Featured revived in 2025, giving experts a choice between pitching inside a platform or responding to email digests.

The company has not published a comparable user count from before the 2024 shutdown, so there is no clean way to measure the platform's size today against its Cision-owned peak. Founders using the service should treat it as a platform operating under a familiar name and logo rather than a straightforward continuation of the network built up over more than a decade.

What it costs to pitch through Qwoted

Not every query platform is free. Qwoted, a paid alternative, publishes three tiers. Its Basic plan is free but limits a source to two pitches a month and delays access to new journalist requests by two hours. Its Pro plan, at $149 a month, raises that to 35 pitches a month with no delay. A Teams plan, priced individually for each customer, removes the pitch cap entirely, offering unlimited pitches with no delay.

The two-hour delay on the free tier matters more than it looks. Journalists working on same-day stories often choose whichever credible pitch lands first, so a source relying on the free tier is, by design, pitching after everyone on a paid plan has already had a chance to respond.

The vetting problem these platforms are trying to solve

Every relaunch of a query platform in the past two years has leaned on the same promise: better screening of who is allowed to pitch. Featured's stated reason for rebuilding vetting into the new HARO was to filter out fake sources and AI-generated pitches, a practice that had spread as it became cheap to mass-generate plausible-sounding expert quotes.

None of this changes who controls the final product. A journalist who selects a pitch still writes the story, decides how much of the quote to use, and is not paid by the source for the inclusion. That is the basic distinction between responding to a journalist's own query and buying space in a paid contributor program or sponsored section.

What a platform pitch actually requires

Treating a query platform as a source of regular coverage requires ongoing attention rather than a single submission. Executives who sign up typically need to check digests or dashboards daily, since the window for a timely pitch on a breaking or scheduled story can close within hours of a journalist posting it. Because free tiers like Qwoted's Basic plan cap submissions at two a month and delay access by two hours, an executive who wants to answer most relevant queries on a given topic is pushed toward a paid tier or an unlimited plan.

Query platforms sit alongside, not in place of, the direct pitching and relationship-building that still accounts for much of the earned coverage in major outlets. They tend to suit specific, timely quotes rather than feature-length profiles or sustained visibility in one publication, and the quote that results carries no payment and no guarantee of future coverage from the same reporter.