It should surprise no one that "professional" journalists hate Wikis and blogs.

A little history lesson shows you why. Only this one's fun. As part of your summer reading get yourself a copy of H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days. (That's Mencken to the left.) It's his memoir of Baltimore's newspaper business around the turn of the last century.

Newspapermen at that time were lower class, hard drinking, smoking, swearing, worthless ne'er do wells. You wouldn't bring one home to mother. They hid in saloons, spun lies, spied on people, made less than the corner grocer, and were generally shiftless, lazy bums. Despite this, they considered themselves a class apart.

This last is still the case. But today's newspaper writers are either middle-class bores or upper-class twits. Those who report on Washington, write columns or work on editorials are among the most twittish. Many make more than the people they cover, especially if their faces are on television.

Blogs, wikis and the whole Internet Business Model Crisis threaten these happy homes. (Although I've got news for them -- stock analysts treat newspaper stocks like tobacco stocks and their ranks are being thinned like turkey herds in September. They'd be a dieing breed even without the Net.)

What's most galling to "professional" journalists is not the loss of jobs, or money, but their continuing loss of prestige. On the upper rungs of the ladder they're being replaced by "players" -- sports stars, lawyers, politicians, former entertainers. On the lower rungs they're being driven into poverty -- we've talked before of the corrupted tech press. And in the middle rungs you've got these blogs, wikis and the continuing problems of being treated like a mushroom. (You're in the dark and they're throwing manure on you.)

Our times are, in many ways, a mirror image of the 1890s.

You've got your plutocrats, your gilded wealth, your fading war veterans, a fast-growing sector of Fundamentalists, and a small, highly put-upon reform faction. All is as it was then.

The key differences are that commodity prices are rising, not falling, and that the journalism business, while it is a big part of our problems, is collapsing, not rising.

If you think the Spanish-American victory makes our time different, think again. The actual Iraq war ended in a few months, and has been followed by a long, bloody insurgency. A quick glance at the Philippine War should Clue you in.

The eras read like bookends. America rising on one side, falling on the other. Newspapers rising on the one side, falling on the other. And at the center of both crises were the news business's attempts to grab authority, to define the story on terms favorable to the powerful men the industry served.

History tells us what happened a century ago. The new middle class, and a section of the upper class, turned against the greed and corruption of the time. Reformers were not, as G.W. Plunkitt claimed, "only morning glories." The man who replaced Plunkitt as district leader has his name on the party clubhouse. Real reforms emerged. Anti-trust laws. Unions. Child labor standards. The Federal Reserve. It was messy, the results were highly imperfect, but the liberals of the time moved forward.

What will happen this time?

I have no idea. You will be the judge. The judge, the jury, and the executioner of history is you. You have the the power, and the newspapers do not.

They can't stand that.