- Help a Reporter Out (HARO): One of the largest free online services, HARO brings nearly 30,000 journalists, over 100,000 news sources and thousands of businesses together to tell their stories. If you’re writing for an online media outlet, your website must have an Alexa.com ranking of one million or less to be posted on HARO. Once your query is posted, you can expect a substantial number of responses, which can be both beneficial and problematic. Unless you post a particularly specific query, you may become inundated with poorly filtered responses, leaving you to sort through a ton of email responses. At times, HARO can be slow to inform you that a query won’t get posted. Despite these drawbacks, HARO’s large database is still an excellent site to obtain reliable sources. You can find doctors, lawyers, scientists and business owners and just about any specialty that you can think of on HARO.
- Reporter Connection: Reporter Connection has about 51,000 sources in its database. With Reporter Connection, when you post a query, you have the option to pose up to six questions to potential sources through an intake form. If all you need is a quick quote or fact for an article, you can receive this information from the intake response and then contact your source for permission or verification. This process significantly narrows down your research time. Reporter Connection responses are substantial, but smaller than HARO’s. One of the drawbacks with Reporter Connection is that it doesn’t always generate great responses with tight deadlines. You can find a variety of experts on this site and the intake form can give you specific information into their backgrounds to help your research. Reporter Connection doesn’t use the Alexa Rating except for bloggers who wish to have their products reviewed. However, in order to post a query, you have to verify you are published journalist or freelance writer, usually by providing a link to a website which contains your work.
- Pitchrate: Pitchrate is set up differently than HARO or Reporter Connection. You can post queries here as well, but you can also review possible sources listed, and view their bios and articles they have written. Through its search engine, you can look for experts with keywords and categories. Need a therapist specializing in parenting? Pop in the keywords therapist and parenting and a list of experts with contact info become available. Selecting your sources through this method helps cut down the clutter on your email inbox and shorten the length of the query process. Pitchrate also allows you to post queries on weekends and holidays. Pitchrate doesn’t have any requirements to post a query; however, it does ask you to rate your experience with your expert.
- Seek or Shout: Seek or Shout is a new free service that allows the exchange of experts and information and doubles as a social media page. If you’re looking for content for articles, blog posts or video, you can search the site for people to interview, documents for research or products to review. You can post your request on the newsfeed and Seek or Shout members respond by commenting on your post or messaging you privately. You can create a personal profile page and promote your finished product on your page by giving a “shout” about it. Members who follow you can view your work and promote it as well, either by Twitter or Facebook. To post queries on Seek or Shout, you need to become a member, but there are no requirements for membership. A key benefit with Seek or Shout is that you can receive your responses through the site, sparing your email inbox.
How have you found expert sources? Have any of you used these online services for content, research, or obtaining an interview? If so, what was your experience and which services do you prefer?