Because many reporters understandably are wary for competitive reasons of divulging projects on which they’re working to thousands of PR professionals, we’ve always enabled them to “cloak” their queries — that is, withhold their own name and that of their news organization when sending a query.

In our old system, members had to key a numerical cloaked query designator into a Web form in order to obtain a reporter’s contact inform. In ProfNet 3.0, we make it much easier to respond to a cloaked query, but you won’t know the identity of the reporter unless and until the reporter, having received your query response, opts in turn to respond to you.

Cloaked queries are clearly marked as such. We’ll give you a generic description of the news organization and we’ll withhold the reporter’s name. You’ll respond as you would to any other query.