The AI PR Hack: Get Backlinks From Journalists, with Featured CEO Brett Farmiloe on The Edward Show

Host: Edward Sturm. Guest: Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, owner of Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Published on YouTube February 19, 2026. Runs 26:08. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neQa9Xxlx_k

Lightly edited for clarity. Speaker labels retained. Transcribed from the episode's YouTube captions; filler words and false starts removed, proper nouns corrected, wording otherwise unchanged. The host's mid-episode sponsor read is marked rather than reproduced.

Edward Sturm: Brett, you are the owner of Help a Reporter Out, HARO, which I'm a huge fan of, and you are the founder of Featured.com, and this is your second time back on the show.

Brett Farmiloe: Thanks for having me back.

Edward Sturm: And you are showing a new feature within Featured, which I was checking out before this. It looks really cool and useful for getting backlinks, for getting a lot of press, for getting journalists to pay attention to press releases, for writing relevant stories and pitching them to the right journalists. It looked really interesting to me, and it uses Help a Reporter Out. So I said, you want to come on the show and show it off to people?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. And here I am. I think the problem that Find Journalists actually solves is, within Featured and with HARO, it's reactive media opportunities. Journalists are making requests. You could reply to those requests and then get in touch with the journalist directly. And so there's only so many media opportunities that are the right fit, and yet everyone has something that's interesting that they want to promote. Find Journalists essentially aims to connect you with those promotable, newsworthy types of things and find journalists that you can put that in front of. I'm happy to hop into the demo and show how it works if you want to just jump into it.

Edward Sturm: Yeah. And it uses Help a Reporter Out's network of journalists.

Brett Farmiloe: So with HARO, there are 33,000-plus journalists that have submitted over 17,000 queries, and we're tracking over 2.3 million articles. As a PR professional, how are you supposed to monitor all these queries from all these journalists and then also take shape of all these different articles that are being written? Within journalism, within media, you have journalists that are jumping around from beat to beat, covering different topics, exploring different things. How are you supposed to stay up on it all? So we're taking all of that and we're putting it into a chat interface that allows you to prompt it with anything.

Edward Sturm: It's using an AI agent, right?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. So basically you could sign up for Featured, and you could go to Experts, Find, and start a new chat. Just for the purposes of the demo, right before this I said, find journalists who might be interested in covering the revival of Help a Reporter Out. It processed the request, it found 10 journalists, and then it suggested those journalists. If you're on a paid plan, we make that email address available. If you're not on a paid plan, then we'll hide that email address. Then it shows who they're writing for and recent articles. You could click on the journalist's name and be taken over to the Help a Reporter Out profile for that journalist, and you could see articles that they've recently written, their social media, any pitching guidelines that journalist has put on there, some quick stats, and a few other bells and whistles that are on a lot of different profiles. So this will very quickly allow me to analyze: okay, this person's talking about PR news. This person's talking about how to make press releases work for journalists. Looks like Nicole writes for PR News online. And you can keep going down here. What I could do to make this demo a little bit more interesting is, is there anything that you want to prompt this with that I could show off?

Edward Sturm: You know, I was thinking, I made a podcast about this recently. It's like, what are journalists most likely to respond to? A lot of the time I find that if they have a specific perspective and you make content for that perspective, maybe confirming that perspective, going deeper into it, exploring it, journalists are more likely to cover it, if that makes sense.

Brett Farmiloe: Okay.

Edward Sturm: So a totally easy perspective might be, and this was the example that I gave in the podcast, let's say you're a journalist and you cover, I don't know, things like pets. You write articles about pets, and you believe that all dog problems are caused by human owners and it's not actually the dog's fault. It's caused by the human owner. So would it be possible to actually find journalists who have a perspective like that?

Brett Farmiloe: So we just put in, find journalists who think dog problems are caused by human owners. We've now got the query here. We've got Lauren, whose most recent article, or the matched article, talked about the reason your cute dog becomes a nightmare. You've got Alyssa, a local dog trainer. Another one talking about enforcing leashing dogs. So you have a bunch of different journalists here that you could dive a little deeper into and figure out, okay, is this someone that I could do?

Edward Sturm: Crazy.

Brett Farmiloe: And then you could basically say, hey, Dana looks like a great journalist. Make a pitch to Dana.

Edward Sturm: Really? You could just write it like that?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah.

Edward Sturm: Can you go up to the original prompt?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, the original prompt was exactly what you said: find journalists who cover pets who think dog problems are caused by human owners.

Edward Sturm: Wow.

Brett Farmiloe: So now you've got, basically, the right pitch. It's probably analyzing Dana's recent articles, the publication that she's writing for, a variety of different pitch preferences. And then there's an email that can come out, and you copy, paste and send this off.

Edward Sturm: Wow.

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Edward Sturm: Back to the podcast. But let me ask you this about these AI-written pitches. I think a lot of journalists can sniff out these AI-written pitches immediately. So how much would you recommend editing one to increase the chances of being accepted?

Brett Farmiloe: 110%. I think that this is a great starting point.

Edward Sturm: Starting point.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. You probably would not hear back from a journalist if you just copy, paste and send it off. It's more so, okay, you can offer expert name, and you're finalizing that way. So this is very much a template that you should edit. You should make it your own, make it interesting. You should also go research the journalist, look at the profile, and get to know that person a little bit better, and that way you can actually send this off.

Edward Sturm: You have an interesting story, you have an interesting angle, and this is a great way to find journalists who cover that specific beat and who might be interested in sharing you.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I think for the most part the depth of this directory that it's pulling from is pretty broad. And so the success stories here can range from virtually anyone in any industry that has anything that's worth putting in front of a journalist. The problem that exists on the journalist side is sourcing is an infinite problem. It's always hard to find a great source for a story. So if you are doing interesting things, whether you just closed a Series B $100 million round with the best investors in the world, or if you're a small business that is doing equipment financing for manufacturing companies, you've got an angle, and all you've got to do is prompt it and then figure out which journalists you want to build relationships with.

Edward Sturm: 33,000 journalists. That is crazy.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I mean, that's actually going to double here pretty soon. We're going to be expanding that directory out pretty significantly.

Edward Sturm: Really?

Brett Farmiloe: It actually already exists. It's just that we are not publicly putting it in this number, but this is all powered by a journalist directory that's actually a little bit larger. So we're going to be making some moves here to make that number bigger.

Edward Sturm: You can use this for press releases as well.

Brett Farmiloe: Yep. You could actually put a press release in here. So if you're like, hey, I've got my press release ready to go, you could input a URL in here, and then we'll comb the URL and you could get journalist recommendations that way. You could also just put the text in there and then get journalist recommendations. So a prompt could be really small: find me journalists who cover X. Or, hey, we're coming out with a press release and here it is. Who should we pitch this to?

Edward Sturm: And where would you, do you have to, is there any place where you have to host a press release, or could it literally be on any URL? You could have it on your own site?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. You could either put the URL in there or you could just put the text in there. So if you just had it in a Google Doc or a ChatGPT, you could copy, paste that, put it into this prompt, and then search.

Edward Sturm: Do you think that this could be more effective for getting your news covered than an expensive PR platform like PR Newswire?

Brett Farmiloe: I think that press release systems have their place, and there's an increasingly more interesting use case around the GEO stuff with press release newswires. But it depends on your objective. If you want to get covered in news, the way to do that is to pitch a journalist and to work with them on developing a story. And so that's got to start with the initial match of getting on the right reporter's radar. That's usually a time-intensive process that requires looking through a lot of different journalist directories, finding the right person, doing the research. This helps expedite and accelerate that workflow.

Edward Sturm: Yeah. The thing about using press release services, or press release distribution services, is it can be really hit and miss. You put out the press release, you think it's super interesting, but even if the right journalist is out there, they might not see it. And when I saw this feature drop into my inbox, I'm like, oh my god, this is going to make it a lot easier for the right journalist to actually see your news.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, definitely. And here's the thing that I've learned with speaking with journalists. I'll get on a Zoom call with them, and inevitably I'm like, oh, wouldn't it be great if you got more targeted pitches? And they're like, no, not at all, because on this call, Brett, in the last 15 minutes, if I open up my inbox, I've already gotten three pitches in the last 15 minutes. I'm getting a pitch every single minute of the day. And so the goal isn't necessarily to send more pitches to journalists. It's to send better pitches that are more targeted, that are more helpful, that help that journalist actually write better stories.

Edward Sturm: And this is allowing you to actually narrow down where you are more targeted and you are more helpful.

Brett Farmiloe: Totally. Because if you use a traditional tool to go find a bunch of journalists, typically what's going to happen is you're going to build a media list, you're going to spray that media list, and there is a ton of irrelevant pitches that land in a journalist's inbox that cloud it up. And we see it all the time with HARO queries, where they'll put out a HARO, they'll get 100 pitches or whatever that get submitted for it, and maybe a percentage of them just aren't helpful. And so journalists mark them as not helpful. It comes back to us, we evaluate it. But in general, a lot of people approach press releases and PR as a quantity game, as a numbers game, and it's not. It's a quality initiative, and this is something that hopefully increases the quality of the connection between journalists and sources.

Edward Sturm: I'm not sure if you said this already. Does this allow you to see previous queries, or maybe even current queries, from journalists within Help a Reporter Out?

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, it does. So I'll just pull up my own here. When it's searching, it is looking for active, openly open HARO queries, and then it's also looking for previous ones, and then also other articles. So this is mine here. I contribute articles to Fast Company and to Inc. I've said, don't send me press releases, so calling that out. And then down at the bottom here we've got HARO queries. Recently I just came out with an article on HARO on how PR professionals are using AI, got 64 responses for that. So you could see previous HARO queries as well as open ones, and then, if it's open, you could click on Respond and get in touch with that journalist directly. So you could use a prompt like, my niche is this, and I am looking for journalists who have open queries that are related to my niche.

Edward Sturm: Sure. That's so much easier than looking through the Help a Reporter Out emails every day trying to find queries that are relevant to respond to. That saves so much time.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, for sure. And the other thing to call out and point out in this is, we own and operate HARO, and the problem with HARO is that it's three times a day, where there's a slight delay in terms of when we actually get the query and when it gets featured in the query. So what we do to essentially enable that journalist to get connected with sources early is we'll cross-post that over to Featured. And if you're on Featured, that means you get early access to HARO queries. So you could very easily go into Questions, click on Filters, click on Show HARO Queries, and then you could look and see 140 active right now. What are the ones that are live right now that you could reach out to? And so you click on Answer, submit your answer, and that's a cheat code as well, to not have to open an email three times a day.

Edward Sturm: I'm sure that you get this question all the time. Generally, are you more likely to be covered if you are the first to respond or if you are the last to respond?

Brett Farmiloe: You know, I think that there's something to be said about first and last, in those bookends. I would say in general, if you're the first to respond with the qualifications and the credentials that are necessary for that journalist, that's the best-case scenario. If you're the first to respond without the credentials and without the qualifications, it's not a great scenario. So when I put out HAROs, and I use it actually pretty frequently, like for this one, building and scaling an applied AI company. This was an article that came out on Inc. I ended up using, I think, three sources out of this. And this was not the first to respond, because ultimately I took a step back, got 140 responses to this, and said, okay, which one actually is perfect for this story? You probably whittle that down to at least seven different potential sources, and then you're like, okay, out of these seven, which ones fill in these gaps? And you craft your article outline, and then you move forward and you conduct these interviews and you put something together. Timing-wise, though, what we hear pretty consistently is that you've got that initial window. PR professionals will echo this: you've got a two-to-three-hour window when that HARO goes out. And if you don't capitalize within that two to three hours, then perhaps it's a failsafe strategy to follow up in a few days and say, hey, just missed your initial one. Just in case you need it, if you're still working on the story, we've got the perfect source for you.

Edward Sturm: I will say, because I've been a journalist for Help a Reporter Out as well, the two times where I'm most likely to accept queries is, one, if it's an urgent story that I'm writing, and then, like you said, the first qualified person, I'm like, great, that's what I need. The second is, if it's not urgent, then I'm actually a lot more likely to take the last responses, because they're the ones that are top in my inbox, and so that's what I actually see first. It's the last responses. Actually, an interesting question, though: if you're a journalist on Featured or Help a Reporter Out, can you use AI to sift through the hundreds of responses that you get to look for the best responses?

Brett Farmiloe: So on Featured, if you're a journalist, what we will do is we actually do that automatically for you and make suggestions on who you should actually select. So of the 140 different responses here, who are the top three? Featured will surface that and look at a variety of factors. We're looking at expertise score: what are the credentials of this person? We'll look at the actual submission itself and say, okay, is this helpful? Is this authentic, a.k.a. is this written by AI? What's the AI detection score on this? And we're putting in all of these different signals to essentially help the journalist get connected with the right person as fast and as efficiently as possible. So that's on the Featured side. And then on HARO, journalists actually have a dashboard that allows them to one-click filter all AI answers. So they could essentially hide that from their dashboard. That'll hide, I think, about 21% of all different queries that we see of people who are using it, 100% AI generation. So that'll shave off some 20% of your time with one click. And then you also have the ability to one-click respond to everyone who's submitted. So your options are, hey, I've shortlisted you, I'll be in touch. Hey, this isn't quite the best fit. Or, hey, I've got all the sources that I need, thanks so much for responding. So rather than having to type out a hundred different emails, you've got your one-click options to make that a little bit more efficient.

Edward Sturm: Wow. This is probably a dumb question, and maybe you can't really talk about this, but what does the algorithm care about in terms of rewarding experts who are submitting expert quotes?

Brett Farmiloe: I think it goes back to, are you the right source for the story?

Edward Sturm: And, sorry, do you also want to lead with your credentials first? Is that a best practice?

Brett Farmiloe: It just depends on the query and what people are looking for. Because you could be looking for someone who visited Barcelona in the last couple of weeks and you need some insights from that person. Credentials may or may not matter. You could be looking for the authority of all Barcelona travel, and then credentials really matter. You run a travel agency that focuses on Barcelona? Great. So I think that leading with credentials depends on the query. And so when we are recommending or suggesting responses to journalists, it's factoring in, what is this query really looking for? How can we be helpful to the journalist? How can we surface relevant responses that follow their exact instructions? And then how can we make that really easy for them to take action on?

Edward Sturm: With the new feature that you were showing earlier, have you messed around with prompts and found that there are some prompts that are extraordinarily useful and other prompts that you hoped would work but don't work that great?

Brett Farmiloe: When we originally designed this, it was for a press release. So it was, put your press release in, get journalists to pitch. And then what we found was, hey, this is actually really interesting to just say, find me journalists who cover topic. Or, hey, I'm doing this news. Who should I contact? So we've got the prompts right there that you can utilize, and then I think it's getting in, messing around with it, and seeing what works.

Edward Sturm: This is super cool. Thanks for coming on the show and showing this.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's two modes, just to conclude this. There's the proactive mode of going into Featured and actually putting in the chat and doing all of this. Then there's the other mode of, when you're not in Featured, how do you still leverage this? So there's the mode of working in the background. One thing that we're going to be coming out with in a few weeks is just email recommendations on who you should actually be pitching. So without any kind of prompt or anything, it's an email that says, hey, here's a new journalist to pitch. And so in this scenario, I've got Kim, who hosts a weekend radio talk show, and she's writing for these. Here's a recent article. And then we've got a suggested pitch here that's like, subject line: hey, I'm Brett. We revived HARO. A bit of context: I launched a coffee company with Hugh Jackman, led two companies past the $1 million ARR mark. We flipped HARO back on. 15 people signed up within a couple of minutes. If you're covering this, or are you open to this call? Great. Edit and send pitch. So it's really important to have the UI available so that you're able to proactively go and find these journalists. What's as important is having a 24/7 agent that's monitoring everything that's happening in the world and then proactively making those recommendations. So this will be coming out really soon. Really excited about it, and appreciate you having me on the show to talk about it.

Edward Sturm: I have a small request. Can you make the AI, when it's drafting pitches, not use em dashes? I don't know if you know it. Em dashes are like...

Brett Farmiloe: I'll take it to the team. I know em dashes.

Edward Sturm: It's the go-to sign of an AI-generated message or article or something.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah. I don't know if there was one in that, but I'll take it to the team.

Edward Sturm: No, there was. And I'm like, ah. Because I use AI for lots of writing, and the first thing I do is I find all em dashes and I replace them with the normal dash, space, normal dash, space. People hate me for that, because they're like, what's wrong with em dashes? They're so good. But I think em dashes trigger people into thinking that you are AI.

Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, possibly. But I'll take it to the team. Appreciate you having me on.

Edward Sturm: Yeah, this is super cool. Thank you for coming on and showing this, and I hope everybody tries it out. I'm just really excited for this. This is episode 960 of the Edward Show. 960 days in a row doing this podcast, no days missed. Thank you again to Brett, to Featured, to Help a Reporter Out. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If somehow you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.

Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and other PR opportunities. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps publishers fill content gaps with expert insights.