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Sarah Lacy's keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at the South by Southwest conference was described as a train wreck as the geek audience heckled the Lacy for failing to get to the point and her interview style. The audience grew bored of the topics (mostly business focused, not technical) that she covered and said the real issues (data portability and privacy) were being ignored. An avalanche of negative tweets sparked a lynch mob in the room, demanding that the interviewer throw it open for Q&A from the audience.
The blogosphere coverage (and mainstream press) coverage of the keynote made the journalist the story - focusing on her interview style, her questions, and the way she handled the negative response from the crowd on the stage. At one of the parties last night, I found myself at table with Sarah Lacy. She said that her goal was to show the human side of Zuckerberg and that she had succeeded. She also felt that she was being criticized for her style of asking questions.
As someone in the audience, perhaps she misjudged what the audience wanted, they wanted to talk about the technical side not the business side. She was trying to have a conversational interview with Zuckerberg.
In a video of Sarah Lacy after the event, she tried to shrug it off and saying that it's just because she's "one of the only women covering tech" and that "it's the price of being high profile." Blog posts and report have been saying that she was ‘flirty’ and acted like a ‘bimbo’ and that she gave girls in tech a bad name.
Gia Milinovich wrote, "If it had been a man interviewing Zuckerberg, I’m 100% positive we wouldn’t have heard a thing about it other than, perhaps, ‘Zuckerberg’s a bit boring, isn’t he?’ As it is, I think Sarah has been criticised for being, well, female."
Jeff Jarvis has a good, non-sexist take on it:”At the end of it all, I have no doubt that Lacy is an experienced and talented journalist, that she respects Zuckerberg, that she was trying to put him at ease, and that she was going after the stories she found interesting. But that’s the essence of her problem: She didn’t stand back and remind herself that her job was to enable a conversation not with her but with the crowd about what they found interesting.”
Susan Mernit points out "However, I think there's another point here that's worth making--in this day and age of real time interactivity, unconferences and bar camps, everyone in the audience wants to be the interviewer--and, in a way, they should be. One could argue that Sarah Lacy's mistake was in not realizing she was just the vessel to channel the crowd--that she didn't engage enough in participatory media--and that failure made her irrelevant to the audience, who then leapt on her cruelly as she became non-relevant to their agenda."
Beth Kanter is the BlogHer CE for Nonprofits and Social Change and writes Beth's Blog
