Are you Experienced? Too bad.

Jimi Hendrix posed the question elegantly:  “Are you experienced?”

The connotation was that experience was a good thing. Of course, it was the 1960s and Jimi was talking about knowing the benefits derived from familiarity with hallucinogenic drugs, but the question — minus the drug connection — still works for this blog. Experience was once something of value.

Of course, each era has different values.  After accumulating more than three decades of experience on the job, I’ve come to realize that in 2009, the value of work experience — at least in the world of media and other quick-change career paths — has gone the way of other once highly prized qualifications that have lost their punch through the ages.

Especially as characteristics people want in employees.

Consider piety.  It was a sought-after attribute in the Middle Ages, but not so much on today’s top-10 traits you’d want in a life partner, much less the person who serves your coffee and bagel, or worse, your lingeries.  Also not a hot prospect anymore is purity, once demanded in women (though for sone reason, not so much for the guys), but now regarded as quaint as “The 40-Year Old Virgin.”

Charity and hope were traits revered in the Guilded Age and are still major stars among nonprofit associations.  Their popularity seems to be winding down among the general populace, though, people who give less each year to altruistic causes and confine their charitable giving and hopes within realistic boundaries.   Nobody wants to be caught giving a hand-out to somebody who can’t at least provide a deduction on their income tax.

Honor and valor have become symbols, largely used in the context of praising the military and war dead, rather than as characteristics to strive for in real life., much less at the office.  That these virtues are so casually and frequently  tossed aside by the world’s financial manipulators and politicians in pursuit of a buck no longer causes mild surprise, much less a “Hell fire” warning from pulpits..

Truth and justice, also, are rapidly becoming casulaties of the new era.  The media is especially guilty of this, ignoring outright lies and injustices,  itself dissolving into bytes by uninformed or corporate-insider talking heads and John Q. Public. 

News giants pay public tribute to truth and justice, then toss out their long-term employees to upgrade the executive gymnasium at headquarters,  part of “the economic downturn” beyond their control. Right.

Since being laid off in March at the Houston Chronicle, I’ve had time to notice — even study acutely — the changes in American values.  The metamorphosis in the work place, mostly due to rampant greed that has overcome our business-run government and government-run businesses is especially obvious when I’m daily confronted with the fact that my experience –35 years of reporting and writing for newspapers, magazines, museums and public relations offices — seems to be worthless when it comes to getting my next job.

I came to that conclusion, after the lack of enthusiastic response to all those resumes I’ve been sending out for the last four months, even before I got this e-mail this week from another former Chronicle reporter-editor who also saw his job disappear during the March 24 layoffs:

“”No one is hiring anyone with any experience,” my friend wrote. “Entry level jobs (are) for college kids willing to earn $15,000-25,000. With Gannett (newspaper service) laying off another 1,500 people, and the Chronk possibly laying off more later this month, it may be time to pursue other interests.”

Yesterday, I was applying to a newspaper in West Texas for an editing job, but didn’t finish the application.  Re-reading the job description, I was stunned that the ”editor” was being hired to fix the copy supplied not by reporters, but by inexperienced writers in the community.  The newspaper’s managing editor wants someone to help teach journalism on the fly to the contributing writers — people commenting online about things going on in their neighborhoods.  The paper had, like the Chronicle, laid off many of its reporters and now wanted a “fix-it” editor to monitor and re-write the copy sent in free of charge by the “citizen journalists..”

Google and other internet providers regularly promise people they can make fortunes working from home as writers and journalists “with no previous training.”

But citizen journalists are not journalists.   They have not learned to craft and condense sentences or to wake up nights sweating over whether they’d mispelled a name or gotten a quote exactly as it was said.  They are soccer moms, Little League dads, retired seniors, bachelors and teens who have the urge to send in their thoughts to their local newspaper for free or for pocket change, less than a cent a word.

Real journalists are, like me and my friend, getting laid off by the thousands across the nation, with the newsroom doors suddenly shut to us, after decades of loyalty to a profession that proved less than loyal to us.

We didn’t deserve this.  We don’t deserve this..  There’s no valor, no honor in this.  From what I can see, there’s no benefit to anyone that the profession of fair and unbiased reporting of news, events, people, places and things by people trained and honed by experience to do that job is being made extinct.

How will a citizen journalist gain the access to documents and officials to cover the complexities about maniuplation of contracts by vested parties-turned-profiteers?  How will these “journalists” get information to cover the casulaty in a drive-by gang shooting or the children burned to death in a fire?  Or the investigation that needs to be done to bring down a U.S. president mad with power or vice president wishing to conduct a secret war on the U.S. justice system and the Constitution?

It’s a different world now. These stories will be reported from police/fire/government public relations departments or, most likely, not at all.  Instead — well, you can already read and see the “instead. 

I loved being a reporter.  It was a job I was born to do, and one I did proudly for decades.  That I have been shut out of the profession — that the career field itself is shutting down, devolving into blogs and twitters, breaks my heart.

Are you experienced?  If you want a job as a functioning reporter in the new journalism’s future, you’d better say no..