Minimum wage hikes and the future of newspaper employment

With year one of a three-year, 70-cent-an-hour per adjustment minimum wage hike in place, I see three options for newspaper companies:

• At least partially keep pace with editorial staff wage hikes.
• Improve benefit offerings. Since all sorts of companies across industries struggle with health insurance, this means benefit improvements would include more vacation time, profit sharing, 401(k) accounts, flex time, or some combination of all the above.
• Do nothing, let more and more talented people walk, and resort even more to syndication groups, part-timers, stringers, and in the neon lights, fame-hungry “citizen journalists.”

Knowing how capitalistic the business is, my money is on option 3 being the first resort.