I am longtime freelance writer/journalist and Erik is right, the jobs are not there for the “middle ground” presses you are referring to here and when they are, they rarely pay a livable wage. Case in point: back in 2011, I applied for a position as an editor-in-chief of a modest town daily. The expectations were 50–60 hrs/week. The pay? $28K/year. This was for a suburb in the larger Boston metro area — in other words, way out of whack with the cost of living. To offer comparison, I had an editor at another pub I freelanced for at the time who was friends with someone who had that exact same position back in the late 90s and it paid….more (like $33K/yr — back when that covered a lot more for living). One thing should be noted….many of the small town dailies and weeklies that do still exist are now owned by large conglomerates. GateHouse Media has a monopoly on local presses all over the US (WickedLocal). The wages for the workers have shrunk with this kind of corporate control. This might be why almost none of my fellow J-school classmates actually work in journalism anymore and why so many writers I know are moving into web design and coding to supplement their income.