Based on the Twitter messages and blog posts I saw yesterday emerge real time from the SXSW conference, it sounded like Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, truly, a career ending, never seen before train wreck of epic proportions. The crowd was out for blood at the end, said multiple twitterers. People were near to rioting. Chaos, havoc, etc.
For a colorful (literally, multi-colored fonts) summary, see the normally reserved Dave McClure, who says “i don’t think i’ve ever seen such a complete & utter train wreck of an interview before,” adding “it was an astonishing case of Nuclear Fucking Fail.”
Bloggers by the dozens rushed to post something even more scathing than the previous attacks. CNET wrote a gleeful post attacking Lacy (“Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed”), then, realizing the body still had a pulse, came back for more. Wired was right there beside them, kicking away as well.
Here’s the problem, though: The video of the interview, which became available today, shows nothing but a lively crowd and a long, boring interview. Sure, there were a couple of moments where the crowd yelled out, but that is absolutely normal at tech events these days. How anyone could describe this a “nuclear fucking fail” or “descending into chaos” is absolutely beyond me:
Here’s what I think really happened. There was an unruly group of attendees, mostly at the back of the session, who heckled Lacy (and Zuckerberg) during the interview. A few others joined in as well at different points. The heckling drew Twitters saying that some people weren’t happy with the interview. And then those Twitters spawned new ones, trying to outdo the previous ones. And then the “real journalists” jumped in head first and laid into Lacy, safe in the knowledge that they had Twitter messages to back them up.
What in the world drove these “journalists” to write this nonsense? Jealously over the fact that they weren’t on stage, or over Lacy’s new book? Perhaps they just got caught up in the fun of a witch burning. But whatever drove them to write those articles, it certainly wasn’t journalism. Nor was it professional. And, worst of all, it wasn’t accurate.
Mark Zuckerberg is a tough interview. I spoke with him for 45 minutes in front of a thousand people at TechCrunch40, and it was the hardest interview I’ve ever done. Even Lesley Stahl at 60 minutes had a difficult time getting him to talk, and they had the benefit of being able to edit the video. In my opinion, Sarah at least asked the hard questions. The fact that Mark wouldn’t answer them isn’t something to burn her over.
What do you think? Leave a comment or hit the poll, below.
- Yes
- No
Total Votes: 1520
Started: March 11, 2008
Update: A commenter pointed out a great post by Brian Solis on this.
another reason why twitter is fucking useless
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.
A year ago twitter dominated this conference.
Now, twitter helps sensationalize a non-event. Yes, users in the audience may have been bored and even annoyed. But why do people who aren’t there have to care?
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.
In my view, this shows us full circle the low value twitter adds :being able to communicate something really easily often leads to things seeming more important than they really are.
I meant witch burning obviously.
The problem is – when you have PERSONALITY your risk becoming a caricature.
SearchEngineWeb is going thru that now
People with strong,direct personalities will sometimes become exaggerated when spoken about by others – sometimes to the point of becoming satirical.
But ironically, this adds more mystique and intrigue to the person by giving them Thousands of dollars of incessant publicity around the world – thus intriguing hundred of others
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.
I watched the interview earlier this evening and agree with you. Sure, there were hecklers, but all in all it just looked boring. Keep in mind that the crowd was made up mostly of social misfits who can’t carry a 30 second conversation. Just think how far we’ve progressed as a society. One century ago most of the people in attendance would have been institutionalized in an insane assylum.
Good news is that Sarah looked hot!
This clip gets juicy @ about 7:30
http://youtube....h?v=QE8dd5UB3Y4
I’m so glad you called this correctly, Michael. My estimation of you has gone up a bit. I do wish you’d grasp the other nettle here, however (not just the Twitter and Scoble amplifcation), and that is:
Why is it that a games conference can use its PR budget to hire (hire!) a journalist (buying a journalist!) to interview a much-feted social-media magnate for a fake “interview” that is really a kind of staged multi-media production? Intended largely to be consumed later on techcrunch or YouTube and help sell the ads and the next conference, which sells the games? Why do people accept *that*? This is the new media?!
And the behaviour of all those children in the backchat — well, the children are eating their revolution, that’s all there is to it.
http://secondth...hildren-ea.html
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.
Mike hit the nail on the head with this one.
avi muchnick – i think you need to watch the video of me with Mark, and the 60 minute video as well. besides, you’re grasping at straws, trying to find something to hold on to that justifies the blog and twitter response. It just ain’t there.
So it’s Twitter’s fault that people are dumb and like to sensationalize things? When can we stop blaming the tech and start blaming the people with no self control?
Ah, my comment was re: comment 1 — you people are fast.
@1 & @3
You’re going to burn the newspaper because you didn’t like a story in it?
Twitter didn’t write the hate posts! They’re the platform.
If you arrest a drunk driver, do you throw them in jail,
AND shoot the CAR?
No, you just don’t have the balls to use your real name to address the A list bloggers that Twittered the flames.
EPIC FAIL
I like the picture again. Keep it up.
Steven
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.
I am assuming that Facebook hand picked Sarah, as Facebook managed the whole event very very carefully. And is it not clear to everyone that she wrote a book about Facebook and surely has done many interviews with Mark and other people at Facebook in a sanctioned environment?
It seems to me that this was PR event from Facebook and it didn’t go well. It also seems to me that it’s great for Sarah that she got to do the interview, and the book. And, frankly, her career is not riding on whether a bunch of twitterers like her. She’s in mainstream media. It could be argued that has a different audience that the people at SXSW.
@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.
“nothing but a lively crowd and a long, boring interview.”
I beg to differ. And as a woman writer and media professional it’s exactly everything you’d want to avoid. Namely, her lack of professionalism.
It’s one thing to be nervous. There’s no question that this would be an intimidating interview. I think she handled herself well when she stuck to relevant questions.
I think what really bothered people was her incredible self-indulgence and flirting throughout. Self-indulgence in relation to rambling on with her own opinions (at many points, the video is just her talking and him listening). Then there’s the flirting. If it was MTV that would be fine but it was really tacky and sophomoric for a woman of her apparent experience and background to resort to that.
Finally, had Lacy expressed even one small amount of authentic self reflexivity – either in the post interview interview clip or at the various points she’s called out during the actual interview – it might have resulted in some sympathy. Instead, her response is totally dismissive and arrogant.
She was hardly a victim of anything but her own bad choices.
Furthermore, I think it’s rather weak argument to suggest that her detractors or critics are just “jealous.” That’s what the rich kids at school always say about the poor kids. “They hate us because they want to BE us”… uh, no, we hate you because you’re A-holes.
One thing is clear: with friends like you, she’ll surely never achieve the kind of growth she needs – as a professional woman and a journalist.
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.
I once saw a girl wearing a t-shirt with “I have ovaries. Judge me harshly.” printed on it. I wanted to say something so badly, to counter the notion it presented. I literally spent half an hour trying to come up with a strong rebuttal to a two sentence phrase on a shirt. I couldn’t do it. I felt as if I’d run into an absolute truth, particularly when it comes to how women are treated here in the nerdverse. That’s what I see in this lambasting of Sarah Lacy. Yeah, it was a crappy interview. But if the bad interview were done by a guy, it would never have made any waves or gotten any attention. Let alone morphed into this ridiculous shitstorm.
Jen for the pwn
Anyone who uses the phrase “Nuclear F#%@# Fail” and wants to be taken seriously needs to go back to 4chan where they belong.
Whether or not she bombed or just had a reticent person I don’t care. The echo-chamber’s never-ending quest to outdo someone else in screaming headlines is the story here. It turns normal bloggers and journalists into the Comic Book Guy.
omg- Jen (@21) you hit the nail so hard on the head. bravo.
“In my view, this shows us full circle the low value twitter adds: being able to communicate something really easily often leads to things seeming more important than they really are.”
You could say the same thing about blogs. Whether you should is another matter.
Anyone?
SXSW 20 something clones wearing cute t-shirts and ripped jeans thinkng their at the forefront of societal change and innovation…
Addendum – John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is also in play.
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.
Well, not “games conference” but you know “interactive media, machinima,” etc. Same thing.
Avi, what, we can’t dis social media magnates? You would take this uncritical attitude to, oh, Rupert Murdoch?
Not surprised to hear you call it /phail Sean.
Jen, you have a hugely distorted take on this interview for some reason. I watched it twice. Lacy doesn’t interrupt him — he stalls out awkwardly and she tries to keep the conversation going!
I fail to see why it’s “self-indulgence” to confront this kid and ask him if he really is worth the billion. Can’t he answer that like a grown-up?
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.
“I am assuming that Facebook hand picked Sarah, as Facebook managed the whole event very very carefully. And is it not clear to everyone that she wrote a book about Facebook and surely has done many interviews with Mark and other people at Facebook in a sanctioned environment?”
Exactly. And as soon as the interview started.
So far, nobody has really asked Zuckerberg the hart hitting questions because FB simply will not talk to the journalists who aren’t about kissing their billion dollar ass.
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?
I watched the interview and think Michael is being too easy on Sarah. I’ve actually seen Sarah several times and always liked her. But there was no excuse for the way she handled herself during this interview.
The problem was that she tried to make the story about her and Mark onstage together having a chat. Nobody f&%*ing cares about her – they all want to hear what Mark has to say. Even if he doesn’t say much, there is no need to go and tell 2 minute stories about yourself and then plug your book again. Nobody wants to hear that and she did a terrible job during this interview. Hopefully she learns from the experience and gets better next time.
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.
like gossips at a hen, or rooster, party
technology just enables our flaws
‘career-ending’
are you guys serious?
Sarah Lacy is now unofficially the queen of tech media.
Brad – so maybe a few twitters saying “wow, this is boring” or “i wish she’d talk about the API and privacy” would have been appropriate. But this?
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.
I’m glad you put the video on here — I’ve been looking for the full interview (even though this ends a bit before the ending.) I found the interview quite interesting. The mistake I see Sarah Lacey made was not knowing your audience beforehand. This is a technical audience that understand, use and develop FaceBook. Not a business audience — which looked to be the focus of her interview. And I think many in the audience had burning questions they wanted to ask and were getting frustrated by the questions that didn’t relate to them.
That other reporters and articles generalized from this audience reaction to Sarah’s acumen as a reporter is reporter is unfortunate.
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”
jen 21- agree.
not sure if i would say her interview style “sucks”, but her whole sharon stone a la basic instinct act is just weird. does she really think it’s sexy or cute?
with that said, she took the heckling on stage pretty well imo.
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.
1. Dave McClure is wrong. Sarah Lacey does not need to “be a geek” to interview one. He’s just jealous he wasn’t the one doing the interview.
Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of a very high-profile company valued at $15 B. If he can’t answer tough questions, someone else should handle interviews.
I’m sorry but you can’t be a “social networking site” and have a CEO doing interviews if he can barely talk. I know Mark is a very smart and successful guy. I laud him for that. He’s probably a lot smarter than I am but he should not do interviews if he’s going to come off sounding like a total kid.
It’s a good thing Facebook isn’t public. That interview would have killed investor confidence in the company.
All of you Twitter retards can go back and cry in the corner.
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?
Omg, that is terrible.
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.free...17925AAODBACGUI
http://www.free...17712HNVTTDDCJL
They seem to be provocatively geared towards the Social media – but now the ultimate presence on the Search Engines
She is also to thank for the gem of an article about Kevin being worth $60 million.
http://www.busi...33/b3997001.htm
Twitter is for girlie men and their pet weasels.