The career ladder loses its top rungs

One of the many reasons that small markets are not safe from the current roil: small papers and broadcast stations, with their low pay and heavy workload, have always been subsidized by the promise of advancing to a larger market, which (unlike the small papers) offered an upper-middle-class family wage and the time to produce high-quality work.

Now that larger markets tend to be basket cases, this subsidy will cease; fewer talented, hardworking people will be drawn to smaller markets; and the quality of small outlets will suffer observably.