Larissa Padden 00:06

Hello and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host and a former journalist turned PR professional.

 

On this episode, I sat down with Brett Farmiloe, founder of HARO and Featured.com. Brett spoke to us about making connections easier for reporters through his platform HARO, Help A Reporter Out, and the importance of being authentic, relevant, and timely when engaging with the media. Please enjoy this insightful episode.

 

Hi, Brett, how are you doing?

 

Brett Farmiloe 00:41

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

 

Larissa Padden 00:43

Yeah, thanks for being here. I always want to start off by having our guests tell us about themselves. Now you have a very interesting and fun and eclectic background, which I do want to dive into. But first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing now with Featured?

 

Brett Farmiloe 00:59

Sure. I’m the founder of Featured.com, also own and run Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, and both are platforms that aim to connect expert sources with journalists for stories.

 

And in terms of the eclectic background, I started my career as a financial auditor. So I don’t know how interesting that could be, but I have a financial background that’s kind of led me to take an analytical approach to connecting people with places that they could share knowledge.

 

Larissa Padden 01:30

And so HARO and Featured remind me a little bit of kind of two sides of the same coin in terms of who their audience is. But can you give us a little idea of what HARO is and what Featured is and what inspired you to start them?

 

Brett Farmiloe 01:43

HARO has been around since 2008 as an email newsletter that’s sent out three times a day with a summary of journalist requests where sources can reply directly to the journalists if they could be helpful for a story. And so typically someone would sign up for this newsletter, they would get upwards of 20 journalist requests three times a day, and they could then just reply via email.

 

Featured is very similar to HARO, but it’s on a platform. So you could go in on your own time, and you could search for relevant media requests. You could set alerts and be alerted only when there’s a relevant match. So it’s kind of an advanced HARO, if you will. So not everyone has the time to go through three emails a day. Featured is your place if you want to have a little bit more control.

 

Larissa Padden 02:31

So when starting these platforms and thinking about what was kind of missing in media, I’m curious, was it difficult or easy to get publications to start working with Featured? Did it take some convincing? I ask because there’s so much competition among subject matter experts trying to get into the media. So you think that there wouldn’t be a loss for content or publications kind of looking for another connect?

 

Brett Farmiloe 02:58

Yeah, it operates like a marketplace, and the hard side of the marketplace is journalists who have requests. And typically what a journalist is looking for is a very hard to find expert. Picture a paleontologist who did work in South America and they need that person on record in the next 30 minutes. And that’s where HARO and Featured can deliver.

 

So typically you’re not going to find some very easy to answer type of queries because journalists all have their own Rolodex and their own contacts that they can go to. HARO and Featured are places that they turn to when they need some sourcing help. Expert sourcing is still a pretty big problem that exists in the industry.

 

Larissa Padden 03:41

One thing when talking to clients that I always remind them is there’s two to three things that a journalist needs. It’s speed, it’s access, and it’s something new. And it’s really that simple.

 

And I’m wondering when you were having conversations or when you do check in with reporters, if you do, what are they telling you more broadly that they’re looking for? Is it just speed? Is it hard-to-find people? And are there things that they’re telling you they don’t want?

 

Brett Farmiloe 04:08

I always say that HARO is a pretty good acronym for what they’re looking for in terms of being helpful, being authentic, being relevant, and on time.

 

Being helpful is actually looking at the requirements that the journalist has laid out and following those instructions and the requirements and giving them what they need for their story. Oftentimes they’re on deadline, they need to copy and paste something, put it into their piece. So being helpful is critical. Being authentic is not using 100% AI generated stuff to get something across the finish line. And being relevant is making sure that you’ve got the credentials that’s necessary for that journalist to essentially cite within their story. And on time is obviously the speed aspect.

 

So I would say that you’re correct in saying that getting something new, having something timely is very important. I would also just say quality is another thing that rises to the top. AI has set a new quality threshold. And you essentially have to go above and beyond what ChatGPT 5.2 can generate independently.

 

Larissa Padden 05:07

Now you’ve started a few other companies, including Markitors, which is a digital agency. So it’s in that media world. But why start something in traditional media? Did you feel like there was something missing there? Or there was something that needed to be created in the way that the landscape is evolving? Just what interested you about traditional media?

 

Brett Farmiloe 05:28

The tagline for HARO is everyone’s an expert in something. And what I learned in running a digital marketing company for 10 years and servicing 500 small business clients is that everyone has knowledge to share, but there’s not usually an outlet to share it.

 

And so at the same time, if you’re running a small business, you’ve got to build up visibility and credibility for yourself and your company to reach customers. And what’s your biggest asset? It’s not the abundance of money that you have to spend on marketing. It’s yourself. It’s the knowledge that you have.

 

And the problem is that there’s not a lot of opportunity to go along and share those insights. So we wanted to build a platform that democratized access to earned media and really rewarded people for sharing their expertise.

 

Larissa Padden 06:14

Now you’ve been an entrepreneur for most of—and correct me if I’m wrong, all of your career. What made you want to go down that path? What inspires you to start something from scratch as opposed to joining something that already exists?

 

Brett Farmiloe 06:28

One of my favorite games to play with my three kids as I drive along in a minivan is the game of spot a business. And you could look in the real world and anywhere you are, and you could look at products, you could look at services, and you could spot a business that exists. And what I try to teach them is entrepreneurship is very much a game of identifying problems and coming up with novel solutions. And so there’s a lot of problems to solve in the world, and there’s a lot of different solutions that can be generated. I think these are skills that are going to become increasingly important as AI reshapes the workforce.

 

And what I think is going to be really important for people like my son, who’s going on 13 years old now, it’s going to be very, very hard to get a job, I think, for that generation. Because I think for the most part, people who are later in their generations have the expertise required to determine whether AI is right or wrong, and whatever that future looks like. But for people like my son, who will not have that earned experience, where do the experts of tomorrow come from?

 

And I think that it’s going to be a real problem that will exist for the younger generation. And to overcome that, you’ve got to be an AIpreneur, you’ve got to be able to leverage AI to create new solutions to problems that exist and really take hold and take ownership of being an entrepreneur. So for myself, that’s existed for the last 20 years, but I think that it’s going to be increasingly important to be an entrepreneur in the future.

 

Larissa Padden 08:04

Yeah. I mean, it’s a conversation we have a lot, both internally and with clients, like how is AI impacting our industry, other industries, the traditional media industry?

 

And I guess what’s interesting—and you kind of already answered it, but what I think is interesting is the conversation is starting to shift and should shift from what is AI going to change to what are the skills that people need to have now in this new world? What are we going to be focusing on? And it sounds like it’s, in your opinion, harnessing AI and being able to work with AI.

 

Brett Farmiloe 08:36

Yeah. Specifically, I think agentic AI is an area that will become more and more in demand and more valuable to organizations. And what I mean by that is, if you look at today, you can manage people and get the most out of out of that team to accomplish a shared goal and objective.

 

I think it’ll be very similar in the future, where instead of managing a team of people, you might be orchestrating a team of AI agents to work towards a shared goal and objective. So how do you structure that team to move efficiently, move cost effectively, and then produce really quality outputs?

 

So I think that from a mentality perspective, it’s very similar, but it’s how do you create value for your customers? What’s your value stream look like? And identifying who’s creating value within that stream? Is it a human? Is it a machine? Is it both? And how do you optimize the whole flow?

 

Larissa Padden 09:34

Well, I’d asked about being an entrepreneur, because what I’ve seen over the past couple years in media, and part of that is just the way that the landscape is evolving, but you’re seeing reporters kind of become entrepreneurs for their themselves. They’re starting their own podcasts; they’re starting their own newsletters through Substack. And so I just wanted to ask your opinion on that. But then also, what is your advice to people that are trying to build a brand in this day and age, particularly within media?

 

Brett Farmiloe 10:01

You hit on one of the most solid points that exists in the world right now within journalism, specifically. Journalists are now—not by choice—entrepreneurs. And to survive and thrive in the industry, you’ve got to be able to think and operate like an entrepreneur.

 

Most conversations that I have with journalists, when I ask them how many sources of income they have, they hold up two hands and eight fingers and say, “I write for five clients, I’ve got my Substack, I do consultations, and then I just came out with a new course or book that I’m selling on the side.”

 

So in order to thrive in that, I think that it goes back to really basic business fundamentals. Who is your target audience? And what’s the value that you drive for that target audience? That essentially is product market fit. And journalists have to think of themselves as the product and really get granular about how they deliver that product and what channels they do deliver it in, whether that’s a Substack, whether that’s a different kind of medium. Those are all questions that I think journalists are addressing today.

 

Larissa Padden 11:03

It’s interesting how things have changed so fast, too, because when I started, your point of pride was the publication you worked for. And I won’t name the publication, but one of the first places I ever worked, someone was almost let go for having a blog that became successful and did an interview about it. And now we’re seeing kind of the flip, which is like, as a reporter, your currency is your brand, your reputation. That is why you get hired at other brands.

 

I wanted to ask, and this is such a broad, open-ended question, but this industry has always been one that is ripe for disruption. We looked at how is the internet going to change things? And now we’re looking at how is AI going to change things? And over the next few years, where do you see the media landscape evolving?

 

Brett Farmiloe 11:48

I think that look at where it has evolved now and today. It’s evolved to follow the money. It’s evolved to licensing deals for pre-training data for AI models. Unfortunately, from what I’ve heard from a lot of journalists, they feel very left out of that economic model.

 

I think that you’re seeing that universally where look at the OpenAI-Disney deal that just happened. And you look at animators like my uncle who created Abu and Aladdin in the 90s. And now Abu is licensed to OpenAI, and he’s not getting any cut of that. Journalists are the same way.

 

And so I think that in terms of the media landscape evolving, you’re going to get more brands in the space. And those brands in the space might not necessarily have a dotcom attached to them. They’re people. And I think that that’s probably the most interesting shift of the landscape is where and how people want to be featured is dramatically changing.

 

And sometimes that’s being featured on a podcast that’s run by an independent creator. Sometimes that’s just appearing in a TikTok video. Sometimes that’s being featured in a Substack. Other times that’s in a traditional article. So I think that it’s just becoming more fragmented, and it’s becoming more level for anyone to compete with and develop their own brands.

 

Larissa Padden 13:09

So I mentioned at the top that you have this really eclectic background and you’ve done a lot of really fun things. You travel a lot for some of those things. I wanted to talk about some of your favorites and if there are a couple of projects or companies that you started that stand out to you.

 

Brett Farmiloe 13:27

Yeah. So I graduated college. I took a series of cross-country road trips in RVs to interview people about their career paths to form a career education website to help inform college students about what the next steps would be after graduation.

 

So we went 16,000 miles, 38 states, interviewed more than 300 people, wrote a book about it, did about 100 different speeches from Alaska to Miami Beach, talking about the findings from the projects. So that was really cool. That very much formed the foundation for me as a person in terms of world beliefs, in terms of taking all these different perspectives and then questioning them and adopting some.

 

And I think that was really cool. It also taught me that everyone needs an outlet to share their life’s experience and expertise because why else would the CEO of XYZ Corporation spend an hour sharing their life secrets with four dudes in an RV? So that was really cool to do.

 

I also launched an iPhone app company that failed within six months and taught me hard lessons about having solid answers in terms of how big the market is, how you’re going to monetize, and what your margins are. So I think that all of these different experiences tie back and prepare you to being an overnight success that’s taken 17 years.

 

Larissa Padden 14:44

I was going to ask if it’s an often lonely, fun, rough road, but 17 years teaches you a lot of experiences.

 

So I wanted to talk about what’s next for you in 2026. Will you be growing Featured and HARO? Are you looking to start new platforms or add new features?

 

Brett Farmiloe 15:03

We’re just getting started in terms of Featured and HARO. HARO, in terms of helping a reporter out, has a lot of potential to actually live up to that value proposition. I think reporters and journalists need a ton of help and support as they venture into this new era of being an entrepreneur.

 

And so we’re going to be coming out with some different features, such as HARO journalist profiles that tracks byline articles, also promotes all the different sources of income that they have to really amplify those earnings for journalists. We’ll be reactivating HARO jobs to connect journalists with different freelance writing opportunities, so we could centralize a lot of those opportunities in one place. So between source requests, HARO journalist profiles, and HARO jobs, I think that we’re going to have a nice approach to supporting journalists on that side.

 

And then for Featured, there’s so many different things that we’re excited about. Probably first and foremost is having everyone’s personal PR agent with that. So we have a really cool agentic approach where you could develop a knowledge base, you could train a PR agent, and that agent will identify relevant media opportunities for you and then draft a suggestive answer that you could take over the finish line. And so I think that that’s going to be something that’s really approachable and powerful for any everyday expert source that is strapped for time and wants to be featured in the media.

 

Larissa Padden 16:25

So it sounds like PR is—fun for us—another one of those industries that’s going to be ripe for disruption with AI.

 

Brett Farmiloe 16:32

I think it’s going to dramatically change. But here’s the value that PR offers is you always need that expert in the loop. You are the filter that determines whether or not a media opportunity is worth pursuing. Is the journalist credible? Is the media outlet credible? Is this going to enhance a person’s brand and achieve those objectives? You need someone to evaluate that. And I think this is going to be incredibly more powerful for PR folks because now you have agents that can help identify those reactive PR opportunities.

 

And what I’ve learned right now, talk with different PR firms, is you’ve got an intern that’s tasked with five hours a day going in and looking through 400 different Substacks and looking on social and identifying all of this stuff. That person should not be spent identifying the media opportunities. They should be spent pitching and acting on those media opportunities. So that’s one example of like, hey, AI is potentially scary, but actually it’s a huge value add that allows you to do more for yourself and your clients.

 

Larissa Padden 17:38

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, I think that that is true. And where I think the human can still add value is assessing where stories are headed, if that makes sense. Once you get to a reactive cycle of something that is trending in the news, there is so much competition. There is so much noise to cut through to say, “Why should your source be the one that’s in the story or one of many that are in the story”

 

So I think in PR and in communications, the value right now is how are you advising your clients to think of storylines that aren’t in the news yet, but should be, or what’s coming next out of these trending topics that are coming in and kind of cut through some of that noise.

 

Brett Farmiloe 18:19

I agree. And just to add onto it, I also think the value is taking the ginormous data problem that exists within media of you have all of these emerging journalists and creators that are shifting between outlets and beats. And how are you tracking all of that? How can you even stay on top of that? AI is incredible for that.

 

For example, I just started contributing to Inc, and I’m writing exclusively about AI coverage. And you would never know that if you if you were representing a bunch of AI labs, like now I’m your guy, pitch me. And AI could do all that in terms of monitoring, in terms of deciphering who you should actually connect with, versus just the old approach of like, going to one of your favorite PR platforms and just blasting 100 journalists.

 

And in my inbox, I don’t know what happened. But over the last week, I got I’m getting like 10 irrelevant pitches a day from one particular PR platform. And I just like, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. Please let me go to parent company and unsubscribe from everything. So I think that AI makes that match easier, more natural, more organic. And at the end of the day, it’s a net win.

 

Larissa Padden 19:35

Interestingly, when we have reporters on the podcast, the number one thing they tell us about pitching is get how many irrelevant pitches they get. It’s still surprising to them how many people miss the mark. So yeah, seems to be a continued problem.

 

Brett Farmiloe 19:49

And that’s such a cool opportunity. Like you’re looking at a future where AI can identify a new journalist that’s on your radar, that could draft a suggested pitch for you and then put you in the loop where you’re hanging, you’re waiting for this email to come through and click Yes, like make some edits and then send. That is a beautiful future versus just not adding value and making a journalist inbox a scary place.

 

Larissa Padden 20:17

Yes, yes. Well, thank you so much for your time and going through all of this. And I always like to end with maybe a fun question. I wanted to ask, when do you think you’ll be ready to eat a Hot Pocket again?

 

Brett Farmiloe 20:31

For charity.

 

Larissa Padden 20:32

How long has it been?

 

Brett Farmiloe 20:35

2007.

 

Larissa Padden 20:36

Wow. In all seriousness, can you tell us a little bit about what that’s all about the Hot Pocket story and what you got out of that?

 

Brett Farmiloe 20:43

Every entrepreneur has got to bootstrap their way to getting from zero to one. And when I was trying to get the multiple RV trips off the ground, we were trying to save money, me and a friend, that I was paying $6 an hour to work to find sponsors. We found a sponsor in the owner of Hot Pockets, they gave us an unlimited supply of Hot Pockets, we ate Hot Pockets for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 30 days straight for free to save money.

 

And at that 31st day, we looked at each other. And it was like the guy who ate McDonald’s and supersized me. The guy ended up in the hospital, we were on we were on that track. And so we said, “Hey, no more Hot Pockets. Let’s throw these vouchers away. It’s not worth it.” Went through a week of detox. We got clarity, we found a sponsor that was literally a block away from the apartment they were living in. And that’s what propelled the whole tour to take shape and realize the vision that we had.

 

So we haven’t had a pocket since. That was 18 years ago. I really can’t stand it. But if someone made a donation to charity, I’m happy to eat a Hot Pocket for every donation that goes to some charitable cause. That’d probably be the only way to get me out of retirement.

 

Larissa Padden 21:59

Yeah. I mean, well, it’s a good lesson and a commitment to building your brand and business. But that seems like a rough 30 days.

 

Brett Farmiloe 22:09

Yeah. But thanks for asking.

 

Larissa Padden 22:10

Yeah, great.

 

Brett Farmiloe 22:11

And thanks for having me on.

 

Larissa Padden 22:12

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on. And I hope when you have new projects and things change or you want to delve more into what you’ve been writing about for AI for Inc, come back and talk to us.

 

Brett Farmiloe 22:23

Absolutely. Thank you.

 

Larissa Padden 22:24

Thank you.