Dear fellow journalists and other media types,

Have you ever engaged, willingly or unwillingly, in discussion of the percentage of your staff who are Web natives–also known as digital natives? It’s a handy cudgel that’s sometimes used against anyone who’s in any sense a veteran of the era in which print products dominated our business. You’re either a Web native, or you’re not.

And if you spent years committing acts of print journalism? And were pretty successful at it? And admit to loving the print medium to this day? Then you aren’t a Web native, my friend, and you are therefore suspect.

Or so the theory goes. In fact, there’s no particular background that gives you bragging rights to digital skills. I know people with thirty years of print experience who are superb at online. I also know people who arent yet thirty and who have only worked for Web publications whose skills are shaky. But the folks I know who like to talk about Web natives would never use such a phrase for that first sort of journalist, and are likely to assume that the latter sort are natives without bothering to seek evidence.

(Side note: I first read a computer magazine in 1978–and first went online, at a blazing 300 bits a second, in 1978. I’m not sure what that makes me, but I hope that sixty years of combined experience in this world earns me some street cred.)

Note also that the world is full of voracious consumers of Web content who have no particular ability to create or wrangle content that anybody will want to read.

Let’s not forget that the Web medium is so young that neatly everyone who’s old enough to earn a paycheck learned to consume media in the print era. We’re all immigrants here. And it’s entirely possible to speak both Web and print fluently. In fact, if you’re smart enough to question everything you think you know, there’s no better background for the Web than print.

And questioning everything you know forever is the only way to succeed online, since the stuff you thought you learned about the Web in 2007 is nearly as likely to be obsolete as the stuff you learned about magazines in 1997. In same cases more so, since there are such things as eternal verities, and the Web runs on fads, trends, and temporary wisdom.

I don’t mean to discount the importance of online chops–far, far, far, far from it. Any media enterprise that doesn’t have people who love the Web medium and who spend as much time as possible luxuriating in it is destined for failure. Period. Divvying up a staff into natives and non-natives, though, is a counter-productive exercise that tells you absolutely nothing about who you want on your team.

Relevant related point: The real online superstars I know never talk about the notion of digital natives.

Oh, and I lied. There are such people as Web natives. It’s just that the very oldest are around sixteen or so. When they enter the workforce, they’ll do some amazing things. But if you’re old enough to vote, you’re an immigrant to the Web, not a native…