Case Study – Qwoted for Newsrooms
How Good Housekeeping UK's newsroom sources experts with Qwoted
Good Housekeeping UK uses Qwoted for Newsrooms to give its whole editorial team one shared place to find verified experts. News and Features Director Sarah Maber and her editorial team explain what’s changed: no more waiting on the same high-profile contacts, and original expert-led content created quickly, even in response to that day’s trends.
28+
New verified experts uncovered each week
9+
Verified pitches for every call for experts
4 hrs
Fastest turnaround: call for experts to published story
The Challenge
Sourcing experts the old way
Before Qwoted, expert sourcing at Good Housekeeping UK was pieced together from whatever was on hand. For Ellen Scott,
that meant a personal system built up over a decade:
“I have a Google Doc where I keep track of experts that I’ve been using for like the last 10 years, which is handy for a lot of things, but less handy for certain areas, especially medicine.”
When her list ran thin, the workaround was asking colleagues for recommendations or cold-searching for sources: “going around the houses”, as she put it, with mixed results. Two pain points kept surfacing: stale contacts, with experts changing jobs or email addresses and forcing her back to square one on deadline, and AI-generated pitches, where she would track down a promising expert only to receive a response that read like machine-written copy, eating up time without producing usable quotes.
Other sourcing services she’d tried didn’t solve it either:
“It ends up getting quite spammy. You get a lot of press releases through, and then you’re getting messages in your inbox on that platform and then it’s also coming through to your email.”
For Sarah Maber, News and Features Director, the frustration was the waiting game:
“The people I’d reach out to normally were quite high profile, like authors or people I’ve used before, and it would take a while for them to reply. In the meantime I would be stuck wondering whether I should contact someone else.”
And for Features Editor Bethan Rose Jenkins, some beats barely had a contact pool at all:
“I’ve really struggled to find royal experts in the past, especially people who can get back to me really quickly. There tends to only be a few that everybody’s trying to use, so whenever something happens they’re impossible to get hold of.”
The hardest stories to source were the ones that mattered most. From medical coverage to royal commentary, the beats Good Housekeeping’s audience loves were exactly where contact lists ran thinnest.
The Solution
One shared sourcing asset for the whole newsroom
Good Housekeeping UK adopted Qwoted for Newsrooms, a publication-wide account rather than a scatter of individual logins. Journalists post calls for experts describing exactly what a story needs, and verified experts pitch them directly. Every call and every pitch sits in a single newsroom view, building a living expert database the whole team can draw on, with editor visibility across it all. Getting journalists started was frictionless, too. “It was really easy,” says Bethan. “There was pretty much no onboarding because Qwoted had already set us up. Really quick.”
For Sarah, the proof came on a nutrition story, sparked by a celebrity talking about needing fats in their diet. A call for a nutritionist brought back exactly what the piece needed, in time for the deadline:
“The quotes we got were really expert. They provided the option of interviews or full quotes, which saved us so much time. The expert was really highly qualified and replied quickly, so I was able to meet my deadline.”
And where the old way meant holding out for one reply before daring to approach anyone else, “on Qwoted, it’s accepted that a number of experts will be consulted or involved.”
For individual writers like Ellen, the day-to-day difference was immediate: relevant, verified experts in one contained place, not scattered across email and press-release floods. A call for a neuroscientist to comment on heatwaves and brain function went from posted to published in four hours. And on the medical sourcing gap that used to trip her up:
“I have had really great experts, in particular in the medical space, which I’ve previously struggled with. So that’s been really helpful.”
"
It’s the reputable, quick turnaround, really focused quotes. With Qwoted, I’ll actually get answers directly to my questions for this specific article, not promoting some other random product.
Ellen Scott
Lifestyle Writer, Good Housekeeping UK
The Impact
Expert-led stories sourced every week
In under a month, journalists across Good Housekeeping UK published three expert-sourced stories a week through Qwoted, spanning health, home, food and lifestyle. Those stories drew on 111 expert pitches, around nine per call, with the fastest going from posted to live in just four hours. This is newsroom-wide output, tracked in one shared view, not one writer’s personal workflow.
A call for interior designers to weigh in on “tacky” bathroom design drew 16 pitches, the highest volume of any call, and produced commentary from two named designers.
A call for a neuroscientist on heatwaves and brain function went from posted to published in four hours.
Two weight-loss medication stories each pulled in 7 pitches, combining quotes from as many as five doctors and experts in a single piece.
And each call keeps paying off after the story is filed. When Bethan put out a call for royal experts, it reached nearly 2,500 verified sources and brought back 12 pitches covering every corner of royal life: gemologists and royal jewelry specialists, an academically published etiquette expert, a historian of the monarchy, a child psychologist on royal parenting, and an event florist who has designed for the Royal Family itself.
The standout: a former royal butler with three decades of service to royal and titled households across Europe and the Middle East, who served Queen Elizabeth II herself, and who is available for interviews on everything from royal etiquette to the traditions of English afternoon tea. The kind of first-hand insider voice a royal writer could spend years trying to reach came to her, within days of one call.
“I just put a request out and I had loads of people come back to me: jewellery experts, all different things. Having some new names that I hadn’t heard of before, who were really knowledgeable, was super useful.”
She has kept the list. With more royal coverage planned, a single call has become a growing bank of experts the team can go back to: exactly the shared, publication-wide expert database Qwoted for Newsrooms is designed to build.
Bring your whole newsroom onto Qwoted
Good Housekeeping UK is one of Britain’s best-known lifestyle titles, trusted by readers for expert-led coverage across health, home, food and consumer advice. Credible, verifiable expertise sits at the heart of every story, which makes fast, reliable sourcing central to how the editorial team works.
Questions? beth.ashton@qwoted.com
Before & After
What changed
Sourcing Method
Before
Ten-year-old personal contact list, colleague recommendations, manual searching
With Qwoted
Direct, targeted calls for experts posted to a matched pool of verified sources
Medical & health experts
Before
Thin coverage; the hardest category to source
With Qwoted
“Really great experts… which I’ve previously struggled with”
Response quality
Before
Off-topic, PR-driven pitches; occasional AI-generated copy
With Qwoted
Focused answers to the specific question asked
Inbox experience
Before
Spammy, spread across email and other platforms
With Qwoted
Contained in one place, easy to ignore when not
needed
Turnaround
Before
Days of back-and-forth and cold outreach
With Qwoted
As fast as four hours, call to publish
"
The people on Qwoted have proper expertise. You can phone up the source and speak to them directly, and it saves us so much time. The product is really intuitive, and the team has been really supportive in getting Qwoted embedded across our whole newsroom.
Sarah Maber
News and Features Director, Good Housekeeping UK
About Good Housekeeping UK
Good Housekeeping UK is one of Britain’s best-known lifestyle titles, trusted by readers for expert-led coverage across health, home, food and consumer advice. Credible, verifiable expertise sits at the heart of every story, which makes fast, reliable sourcing central to how the editorial team works.
Bring your whole newsroom onto Qwoted
Good Housekeeping UK is one of Britain’s best-known lifestyle titles, trusted by readers for expert-led coverage across health, home, food and consumer advice. Credible, verifiable expertise sits at the heart of every story, which makes fast, reliable sourcing central to how the editorial team works.
Questions? beth.ashton@qwoted.com