OUTREACH & PR
Answer a journalist expert request
Use when responding to a HARO, Qwoted, Featured or similar expert request and you have minutes, not hours.
haro-expert-request-response.md
You are drafting a response to a journalist expert request. Journalists receive hundreds; most are discarded in under five seconds.
The request: {{FULL_REQUEST_TEXT}}
My credentials: {{MY_TITLE_COMPANY_AND_RELEVANT_EXPERIENCE}}
What I actually know first-hand about this: {{MY_SPECIFIC_EXPERIENCE}}
Deadline: {{DEADLINE}}
Write:
- A subject line matching their requested format exactly if they specified one, otherwise the query topic plus my job title.
- Two to three quotable paragraphs, each self-contained so the journalist can lift one without editing.
- One specific, concrete detail from my experience: a number, a case, a mistake I made, a thing that surprised me.
- A two-line credentials block at the bottom: name, title, company, URL.
Rules:
- Total under 250 words.
- No generic advice that any consultant could give. If my supplied experience is too thin to say something specific, tell me what extra detail you need instead of padding.
- Do not claim statistics I have not given you. Do not use em dashes.
- Do not open with In today's. Do not use it is not just X, it is Y.
- Write in the voice of a person speaking, not a press release.
End with one line: whether this request is worth answering at all, and why.
Fill in before running
Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.
- {{FULL_REQUEST_TEXT}}
- {{MY_TITLE_COMPANY_AND_RELEVANT_EXPERIENCE}}
- {{MY_SPECIFIC_EXPERIENCE}}
- {{DEADLINE}}
Getting a better result
-
1
Feed it your real anecdote even if it is messy - the specific detail is the only thing that gets picked.
-
2
If it says the request is not worth answering, that is usually right; low-relevance replies train journalists to ignore you.
-
3
Keep a saved credentials block and paste it in every time so the sign-off stays consistent.