Google CEO Lauds Professional News Organizations, Steps in a Mess?

A smart chief executive officer knows how to tailor his or her remarks to an important ecosystem partner. The trick is to do so without alienating another important part of the same ecosystem. I'm not completely sure Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, completely succeeds on that score.

He makes the point that the importance of "journalism" is its quality, compared to much content produced by bloggers. At some level, that's simply a reflection of reality. Blog content is uneven. And Schmidt is right in catering to the professional content producers whose help could be invaluable in creating more-powerful advertising models for Google.

Still, there are relatively more artful, and less artful, ways of phrasing things. Perhaps another approach would have made the same point without risking some amount of potential blogger ire.