Journalist becomes the story at Mark Zuckerberg SXSWi keynote:
Ugh. Talk about losing an audience.During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address Sunday here at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), on-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion.
“Other than rough interviews,” an audience member asked Zuckerberg during a short Q&A session at the end of the keynote, “what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?”
“Has this been a rough interview?” Lacy asked Zuckerberg.
“I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Mark,” the audience member said.
The battle between Lacy and the audience began almost immediately. From the beginning of her interview with Zuckerberg, she repeatedly interrupted him, and all around me, I started to hear annoyed murmurs of people saying that she should stop doing so.
Later on, Zuckerberg himself seemed to get annoyed by Lacy’s style. As he was answering one of her questions, she began to talk over him, only to notice his reaction.
“I kind of cut you off,” she said. “You kind of had this hurt look, like, ‘I was talking.’”
Near me in the third row of the ballroom, someone said, “Is she serious?”
It only got worse from there.
At one point, Lacy got confused about how much time was left for the interview, and Zuckerberg teased her.
“Did you run out of questions?” he asked.
The line got a huge cheer from the thousands in the audience.
By now, it became clear to me and everyone around me that the audience was totally on Zuckerberg’s side and totally against Lacy. A few minutes later she began to ask him about a series of journals he has kept about Facebook’s progress over the years. Zuckerberg clearly felt that she was leading him, and seemed to clam up a little bit.
“You have to ask questions,” he said.
Again, his line generated a massive cheer from the crowd.
By now, Lacy was becoming aware of how she was losing the crowd, and said, “Anybody who’s seen my (TV) show…has seen me throw a whole glass of water on (Techcrunch founder Michael) Arrington.”
With a sly look, Zuckerberg grabbed her water glass and moved it out of her reach.
She then tried to follow up the line of questioning about the journals, saying that one of the interesting things about his process was that he burned the journals when he was done with them.
“I don’t do that,” Zuckerberg said. “You made that up.”
Shocked, Lacy called out to the back of the room where someone who had apparently sat and talked with Lacy and Zuckerberg the night before was sitting in an attempt to get confirmation that he had said he burned his journals.
Someone from the crowd yelled out at the top of his lungs, “Talk about something interesting!”
Again, a monstrous cheer.
At this point, Lacy lost it.
“Try doing what I do for a living,” she said. “It’s not that easy.”
The crowd was not sympathetic, and some demanded that she turn the microphone over to the audience so they could ask questions.
So she responded angrily, “Let’s go with the Digg model and let them have mob rule.”
And as the audience members began to ask questions, she said, “Someone send me a message afterward about exactly why I sucked so much.”
In response, someone yelled out, “What’s your e-mail address?”
And someone else shouted, “Check Twitter.”
Indeed, a quick glance at some of the Tweets that went out during the interview were devastating to Lacy.
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But it was her style that lost her the audience almost from the minute it started. She seemed flirty with him, trying to put on an air of being his buddy, when what the audience wanted was to listen to Zuckerberg talk.
Sarah Lacy’s response isn’t too impressive either: