The “Nuclear Disaster” At SXSW Was Nothing More Than A Witch Burning

March 10th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

I agree with you Michael. With burning and jealousy that is. Many people out there and on the web criticizing would have loved interviewing Mark. Sarah succeeded in one thing, making this interview memorable and well covered. Organizer of LeWeb in Paris, I would have been happy of such a coverage so in the end, SXSW must actually be very happy, as well as Mark and hum, Sarah.

March 10th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

I meant witch burning obviously.

March 10th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

No matter who caused there is pretty universal agreement that it was an extremely lackluster interview. Mark is a great CEO and has a great hold over his company, but I think for interviews they need to get someone else to do them or not do so many. He doesn’t seem to enjoy them all that much, and he repeats the same non-answers to the same questions time and time again.

Even though the interview was horrible I have to admit that the press has been crazy like Sarah really ruined the whole conference. The real news here that there was no news from Mark, Sarah didn’t ask the best questions, but most of all that the crowd became incredibly rowdy. That unruly of the crowd is always reported on yet never criticized. I’ve given bad presentations before, and sure you get yawns, sights, etc., but to get hecklers is alarming and rude no matter how bad the interview is. As an audience member you should just leave the event before getting to the point where you are yelling out and disrupting it.

March 10th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

This clip gets juicy @ about 7:30

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QE8dd5UB3Y4

March 10th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

Michael, with all due respect - she belittled Mark on stage. She called him a kid a few times, questioned Facebook’s valuation in a way that wasn’t inquisitive, but loaded and in general painted herself in a negative light. She interrupted him.

Forget about the crowd for a second. Forget about how shy Zuckerberg is on stage. The “nuclear fail” (ugh, I hate that buzzword) was that she disrepected her interviewee. The crowd noticed and wouldn’t let her forget it. That’s the cardinal sin for public interviews.

The crowd picked up on that and that’s what triggered that awful feeling of awkwardness watching the interview.

March 10th, 2008 at 10:46 pm

Ah, my comment was re: comment 1 — you people are fast.

March 10th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

EPIC FAIL

March 10th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

Zuck is a “kid”, Sarah didn’t mean anything behind it - you people think too deeply.

just because it’s not an old fart interviewing Zuck, you traditionalists get scared.

As for the ‘heckling’ audience at the event, they need to stfu - they can ask questions later.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

@14

easy with the late night mountain dew

am just saying that last year everyone was saying that twitter is the end-all. some may see it as a great platform (it’s a miracle it stayed up). and it may help /have some usefulness, but it didn’t live up to it’s hype. one year later, twitter seems like a pain.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

It looked to me as if she was trying to loosen the ” kid” up so he would relax and may talk with a little more sense than he has in the past. She was trying to bring out the human side of this ” kid”. As for the crowd, those that whooped and hollered acted like college drunks at a Wet T shirt contest. Damn I hate bandwagoning and the “me too” crowd.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

Jen for the pwn

March 10th, 2008 at 11:12 pm

omg- Jen (@21) you hit the nail so hard on the head. bravo.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

SXSW 20 something clones wearing cute t-shirts and ripped jeans thinkng their at the forefront of societal change and innovation…

March 10th, 2008 at 11:17 pm

I wasn’t there, but watched the video of the interview. What bothered me most was Sarah’s body language…flirty as some have mentioned, but who interviews someone with their knees together - feet apart, slumps back and so far down in the chair she is about two heads below the person she is interviewing, and so on. Is it ok now for journalists to say ‘like’ 50 million times in an interview? Good grief. And, for Sarah to then go on Twitter and make crude remarks? Ugh, just a real low as far as standards. That’s depressing in itself. I thought Mr Z looked enthusiastic about presenting his ideas until he had to listen to whatever it was she was going on about with his journals. Seems to me the real story is someone should be fired for hiring Sarah - she’s not exactly high quality. Who cares what she looks like, come on guys, you can get that anywhere.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

people did go a bit overboard describing the interview, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a terrible interview. forget about the crowd, forget about her demeanor and boil it down to the heart of the interview- the questions.

Aside from her continual nonsensical rambling, the questions that she actually did ask were terrible. The fact that she apparently had discussions with Mark in the past indicated to me that she was incredibly unprepared with absolutely no direction. It’s one thing to improvise portions of an interview but you have to at least deliver some sort of cohesive thought.

And when she gets called out on it, she gets defensive. The irony is, the kid in the audience probably asked the best question of the video. The delivery is poor, but at least he had the “hard part” down.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

Adding, I agree about Twitter. “If twitter helps a group of bored influential people pass their time, great. But let’s keep twitter in the background, and not let it replace valuable discourse or content. The fact you can use it to whine, or led credence to a story, is painful.” Is Twitter really discourse or even content? Maybe too many people are lulled into thinking it is and their Twitters are somehow more meaningful than they are?

March 10th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

I watched it live in the overflow room. To judge this you needed to watch it with a room, because the people in the overflow rooms were also reacting in ways similar to (but not as strong as) the main room. Watching on your own you would not get how she lost the crowd.

It was not a nuclear melt-down. It was just an interview that was antagonistic, and over issues the crowd didn’t want antagonism over. The crowd would have been happy to see MZ asked hard probing questions over Facebook privacy problems, troublesome features and policies. She asked invasive questions about valuations and being a young billionaire and personal style.

This was a crowd of developers and designers. They want to know MZ as a designer and operator of an important tool, not as a kid billionaire. Lacy was asking the wrong questions for the crowd, and they were mean questions if you weren’t interested in her tack, and so the crowd quickly wondered why she was doing this. Add to this a style which often seemed more about her than about MZ and you understand why this crowd started getting frustrated with her, then viewing MZ as the good guy and her the outsider attacker.

Lacey didn’t understand her audience, and the audience reacted negatively. If you think that was a witch hunt, and you weren’t in the audience, it could be you also didn’t understand the audience. It was a mistake. Not a career ending one, but a mistake. I suppose the bigger mistake was, once the crowd told her she wasn’t asking the questions they wanted, she got defensive, rather than doing her job and correcting her approach based on the feedback.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

‘career-ending’
are you guys serious?

Sarah Lacy is now unofficially the queen of tech media.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

I definitely agree with you. Usually boring interviews are simply forgotten. Only an immature crowd of geeks and narcissistic, pseudo-journalists would have results like this.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:41 pm

I think the failure was not Sarah Lacy but Mark Zuckerberg. Is this guy REALLY from Harvard? All he can say about Facebook is that it allows people to “communicate more efficiently”. He kept repeating himself and trying to sound eloquent but he did not say anything profound at all. His tone even sounded like one of the characters from the movie American Pie…

“and this one time on Facebook”

March 10th, 2008 at 11:42 pm

Sarah Lacy has one of the worst voices for doing interviews.

In addition, zero professionalism that is highlighted by saying junior high cool words such as ‘like’ in every sentence.

Plus, Sarah is so obviously in heat that she should be locked up.

March 10th, 2008 at 11:47 pm

damn jen@21 i totally agree with what you’re saying here but since i presume you’re female, i don’t know whether to give you props or start gathering firewood…ok, since i’m totally objective, you get the props.

i was about to barf at the part where she starts talking about (can i tell them about the thing? the books?) mark’s hand-written books! remember when you told me about those the 3rd time…wait no the 5th…or was it the 8th time we met?

March 10th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

Now that Techcrunch is getting so much TrustRank from Google - you might want to take the Google Organic SERPs into consideration when chosing your blog titles

http://www.freezepage.com/1205217925AAODBACGUI

http://www.freezepage.com/1205217712HNVTTDDCJL

They seem to be provocatively geared towards the Social media - but now the ultimate presence on the Search Engines

March 10th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

Twitter is for girlie men and their pet weasels.

March 11th, 2008 at 12:02 am

Lacy had a bad day and that happens to everyone. I think the comment “talk about something interesting” takes me back to the high school auditorium.

The reason this happened is poor preparation, she obviously didn’t take the interview serious enough or evaluate the quality of her own questions before the event.

I watched Mike’s interview with Mark and the big difference is he came prepared. Notice his notepad in hand, this helped keep the conversation on track and showed the importance of the interview to him.

Lastly, there are better match ups than others for interviews and the most successful interviewer for Mark is not easy to define. As with most things, I think preparation is everything.

March 11th, 2008 at 12:05 am

I really don’t see what the fuss was all about with this interview, and it goes to show all those media who are simply feeding on a non-story.

Granted that I don’t know about this Sarah Lacy character, so I’ll just judge it on the basis of the interview:

(a) No chemistry between the interviewer and interviewee. Zuckerberg obviously had a prepared script, and he obviously just wanted to get through it…by talking to those in the dark (off the stage). You can see how often he made eye contacts to the interviewer. But looking at those mild flirting hints of Lacy like curling hair with her fingers while talking to Zuckerberg simply didn’t work with him. It just made her all the more annoying and pathetic.

(b) The attitude of the interviewer really was quite annoying. She’s so full of herself that at times she’s more interested in promoting herself (eg. how much she learnt “in the past” about Zuckerberg, and the story about Zuckerberg being nervous in those past interviews) than to draw Zuckerberg out for the audience. I’d say, stories like those would make interviewees uncomfortable, rather than the other way round.

(c) The prepared script by Zuckerberg for the interview was pretty quite boring. Granted that Facebook is not really revolutionary, if you put the term “Facebook” in his script, and substitute it with another company’s name (eg. MySpace), 95% of what he said still applies.

March 11th, 2008 at 12:15 am

Wow, sounds like a modern version of Lord of the Flies.

March 11th, 2008 at 12:26 am

arrington, i think that if you were there you would have written a completely different article…. or maybe not… is lacy paying you for this?

March 11th, 2008 at 12:42 am

Lots of alternative ‘commentary’ on Sarah on Bitstrips. Here’s one example:
http://strips.bitstrips.com/34.....02f639.png

I like the idea of comic current affairs reporting

March 11th, 2008 at 12:44 am

sarah did her job well. i can hear mike when he said his interview was difficult. this guy (MZ) needs a course in communications, so at least he can stop repeating himself.

as for the punk who complained in the end, you know the “funny” guy, did you pay attention to his SO EVER INTERESTING QUESTION? it was - what is the biggest obstacle that facebook faces in the coming future?

now THAT is a question for developers and designers. RIGHT! Talk about cliche questions. the dude just wanted to do his funny stunt and figured the simplest question his stoned brain could come up with. of course he’s got no interesting answer. sarah went borderline simply because you just cannot script cliche questions with this guy. now we know that doesn’t work either, but i can tell you, she did it as entertaining as it could be. and sorry to say, i’d rather watch sarah than mike, but that’s just bewteen you and me.

March 11th, 2008 at 1:00 am

mike -

i consider you a friend, but i’m sorry this is complete, utter bs. maybe you’re just baiting us Calacanis-style, but regardless how the hell do you have a legitimate take on the events that went down from a thousand miles away?

if you want to have an informed opinion on what happened, i have no idea why you don’t get your butt off the couch and come to austin like the rest of us. you know as well as i that kind of reporting doesn’t come from a TV set, from a computer screen, or heaven forbid from a 140-character window on your iPhone.

seriously: i have no idea what clip you were watching, or whether something else might be coloring your reaction to what went down, but you’re on another planet if you think that wasn’t a clusterfuck of epic proportion. the video alone is condemnation enough, but the audience opinion was pretty universal she whiffed bigtime.

unruly? perhaps a bit. but a lynch mob? NFW.
sarah dug that hole all by herself. and she never stopped digging.

(come on out to austin next year mike. i bet you’d have a great time, and we’d love to have you out. beers on me…)

March 11th, 2008 at 1:13 am

Well, the tweets I follow were more like that, or in fact even better. I am sure some people posted nasty ones. That’s going to come with the territory and I really don’t think it is what set the tone of the crowd. Perhaps a small fraction of it. Entire crowds don’t burst into simultaneous laughs _at_ the interviewer and large rounds of applause _against_ the interviewer just over some rude twitter postings. This was unusual. While again, I don’t think her career is over or anything, I have not seen an interviewer lose their audience like this in a long time.

At the start of the session, she’s supposed to be the audience’s proxy up there to help us learn about MZ and Facebook. She’s supposed to get him to talk about what we want to hear about. But within a surprisingly short amount of time, the audience is antagonistic towards her and is cheering for MZ as though he’s the underdog. Sorry, but that’s a failure, no matter how you look at it.

Most telling is when one audience member gets up to ask a question at the end about Facebook’s biggest challenges. SL starts talking and the audience member is remarkably rude and interrupts her and says “I was addressing my question to Mark.”

As I say, that’s quite rude. Yet, remarkably, the audience cheers. The interviewer has gone from being the audience’s advocate to their enemy, and that’s why people were buzzing about this as a badly done interview. When people in the overflow room start cheering like this — even though neither MZ or SL can hear them — you know it’s a bad sign, and the interviewer’s chemistry has entirely vanished.

If Lacey doesn’t realize she blew it, then she’s moving into career-damaging territory. She shoud just admit she picked the wrong style, apologize and get on with it — not blame it on twits on twitter, or rabble-rousers, or an audience conspiracy. I was in the audience, and reading a fair number of tweets and it simply wasn’t those things.

March 11th, 2008 at 1:20 am

The concept of “community” in Web 2.0-land has definitely jumped the shark. You may friend someone (or de-friend them as the case may be, thnx Mike ) on all of your social media sites, but not know much about them in real life. Without this real time accountability, it’s easy to toss out civility– especially shared civility — and go for the jugular.

Amazing how de-humanizing this whole Sarah Lacy and the question-adverse Mark Zuckerberg story is. Seriously, Sarah did her job as the interviewer with a very challenging interviewee as evidenced by the video. It was an interview that lasted for an hour, that’s all. Hardly anything controversial and nothing ground-breaking.

However, there’s a clear lack of respect for Sarah as a person or journalist, with many folks casting stones who are as guilty (if not more) of occasionally committing the ultimate cardinal sin in our driven-to-distraction web culture: not being what other people want. Entertain us now! Dammit! Or else we’ll twitter our discontent. Naysayers with SXSW hash tags.

The hecklers now have RSS and throw rotten tweets instead of tomatoes…

Sarah’s a talented journalist and has proven herself by engaging in the community for years. Apparently, that doesn’t mean much anymore. The screaming cult of the present moment negates past accomplishments and future potential.

A sad commentary, to be sure, but one she’ll rise above to keep doing what she does best > being herself without apology.

March 11th, 2008 at 1:24 am

I was there and I have to agree with Arrington. Sure, the interview wasn’t great, but the crowd just went overboard. I had no idea why everyone was so pissed. I mean, what the hell do you expect from Zuckerburg anyway?

Mark said “well, you have to ask a question?” and then everyone started cheering and jeering at Lacy. It felt very random. It makes sense now that it was all through twittering. Very self absorbed crowd there. To hipster for their own good. I met a lot of cool people, but too much self important types.

March 11th, 2008 at 1:36 am

I agree with alisha,it wasn’t that bad. he’s a hard nut to crack .

March 11th, 2008 at 1:42 am

sarah went borderline simply because you just cannot script cliche questions with this guy. now we know that doesn’t work either, but i can tell you, she did it as entertaining as it could be. and sorry to say, i’d rather watch sarah than mike, but that’s just bewteen you and me.

March 11th, 2008 at 1:54 am

Interview sucked ass - it seems as if people with this opinion are now part of the ‘mob’

Fuck that - call it like it is - For a keynote this interview was a bunch of bullshit wrapped in a box of crap

‘Ahh, shux, but Mrs. Lacy was ridiculed and what not!’
Of course she was! The dumbass should have known her audience and not acted like a coked out highschool chick interviewing the varsity QB! Platitudes aside, the crowd knew it, tons of twitter’ers knew it AND I knew it…

Oy Vey!
Dios Mio!
Jesus H Christ!
The interview sucked! Is it THAT hard to recognize…