Digital PR specialist for SaaS real estate company

We are StreetSpring, a small-business location-data company. We model how likely a business is to last at a given address, block by block, across 24 US metros. We are hiring a digital PR / earned-media specialist to turn that data into citations and earned links. WHAT WE ACTUALLY HAVE A real dataset, openly licensed CC BY 4.0 and deposited with resolving DOIs on Zenodo, figshare and Harvard Dataverse, plus mirrors on Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub. 24 metros, 116 neighborhoods in Philadelphia alone, 110 business types, per-neighborhood scores with ranks and tiers. About 820 live indexable pages. WHERE WE HONESTLY STAND Domain Authority 2. We rank for 6 keywords. We have 192 referring domains of which we just disavowed 125, because a previous contractor bought links from a PBN network: 42% of our referring domains were in Singapore, 12% in Moldova, and the anchor text was a link vendor's boilerplate repeated across about 139 domains. We are starting from close to zero, deliberately and cleanly. WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN TRIED AND HAS NOT WORKED Cold email at volume. 1,411 addresses, 14 replies, zero positive. We are not looking for more of that. WHAT THE JOB IS Earn citations from journalists, researchers, civic and trade publications who genuinely want a number we have. Specifically: build relationships with data desks and local newsrooms, place original findings, and get us cited in the annual round-ups and city-business stories that get written every year anyway. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE Referring domains from publications a human would recognise. We will judge on the quality of the domain and the relevance of the context, never on a count. If you propose a number of links per month, we are not a fit. DO NOT APPLY IF You offer guest posting, link insertions, paid placements, PBNs, or "high DA" packages. You will not name your past clients. You promise a specific number of links. We have just spent real effort cleaning up exactly that. TO APPLY, ANSWER THESE 1. Name two data-led stories you placed. Give the URLs and say what the data was. 2. We have a dataset and almost no authority. What are the first three things you do, and in what order? 3. How do you decide a link is not worth pursuing?