At 40 DA, judge the placement on the page and the neighbours, not on the score.
What makes a media placement behave differently from a blog placement is the traffic shape: a spike in the first 48 hours, then almost nothing, then a slow trickle that search supplies for months. That is a fine trade if you want proof your brand can be quoted; it is a poor trade if you bought the slot hoping for a permanent contextual link. Confirm the permalink will stay in the site's archive before you commit.
Ranked against the 2,000 listings we index, nvtimes.co.uk sits in the top 93% for audience and the top 52% for authority, at $1.25 per thousand monthly visits. Inside the DA 40-49 band (703 listings) that price ranks 58th for value, which is the comparison to use: nobody competes with the whole index, they compete with the sites a buyer would book instead.
News sites are the hardest place to earn a body link and the easiest place to earn a mention. Editorial staff strip links from contributions more often than any other publisher type, and the ones that survive are the links that carry a source, a figure or a document a reader might want. Build the piece around something citable and a link stops looking like a favour.
The index lists this property's editorial links as followed. Availability of a followed link changes with the site's monetisation decisions, so we confirm the tag on the live URL before counting delivery.