What HARO encourages—and the site is filled with thousands of posts asking for it—is for journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine–friendly premise.
