A small town has, say, 50000 residents.

If half of them visit the local newspaper daily and read ten pages, there's 250K daily page views, roughly 90M annual impressions.

At $1 CPM, that's $90K in annual revenue.

At $7 CPM (what the NYTimes claimed 10 years ago), that's $630K revenue.

With that, they could probably afford a staff of 2-5, depending on the town and cost of living.

If they're in a town of 5000 people, it's unlikely that they will make enough money to survive.