Why did the media react so strangely to the Mark Zuckerberg keynote?

March 11, 2008 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

zuck-lacy.jpgYou may have read coverage of the keynote Q&A with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg at the Austin conference SXSW over the weekend.

CNET and Wired jumped all over the interviewer Sarah Lacy, for doing things like interrupting Zuckerberg and interjecting herself into the talk — and they cited heckling audience members to back up their opinions that Lacy’s interview was a bomb. However, we’ve just watched the video and we have to agree with Mike Arrington at Techcrunch. Lacy actually asked a decent set of questions and tried hard to spice it up. Zuckerberg had plenty of time to talk about all kinds of issues, and he’s known to be a hard interview. In fact, she did a good job, introducing new tidbits about Zuckerberg and the company that she uncovered during research for her book.

The brief heckling near the end (see around min. 50) appears to come mainly from developers who apparently wanted more questions about the platform, instead of the inside story about Facebook’s finances and personal anecdotes about its leadership that Lacy was focusing on.

The back-story is that Lacy doesn’t seem to be liked much by other journalists, and they seemed to jump all over her as soon as they got a chance. A very odd moment in journalism. Watch it for yourself (see below).

One note of substance in the interview: Zuckerberg expresses significant support for Matt Cohler, a young executive at Facebook. Cohler has been at Facebook for years, but now he’s clearly being entrusted with helping lead the company as it scales to multiple hundreds of people in size.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Kohl
    Couldn't agree more. The interview was fine. The hecklers wanted to know relatively low level details about facebook that you do not need to have the CEO answer as you could see from the dull Q&A at the end. The interviewers questions were at the appropriate level for a grown-up audience.
  • that was sort of brutal towards the end, but on the whole it was ok. she seemed to focus on all the gossipy aspects of Facebook the business, while neglecting her audience. they don't want to hear about the yahoo deal, they want to hear about project management and feature sets. useful stuff to people who are concerned with those issues. the q&a seemed interesting. too bad it got cut off mid question.

    also it seems Zuckerberg likes specific questions.
  • PO
    Sarah is a sexy girl, if I was a plain & dry journalist I would be jealous of her.. ahah
    she was just making the guy comfortable! it was a more informal interview... so what?
  • Matt, I would just say as a SXSW attendee who missed the keynote (I was still in the air at the time) that the Sarah Lacy crucifying did not originate with the journalists. Your assessment seems pretty far off to me. As soon as I touched down I started hearing about the keynote, and the chatter has not stopped since. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has an opinion about this.

    If someone assigned to cover that session of the conference did not cover the controversy, it would have been extremely strange. That said, I think this was a case of mob lynching which Sarah didn't deserve, but her getting defensive kept the snowball rolling.
  • I was at the keynote, in the back. My group had five women and one other guy. We were all cringing a couple of minutes into the interview. Perhaps it plays better on the video, but Lacy's questions came across as incoherent and rambling.

    She seemed to be intent on humiliating Zuckerberg with some of the questions and statements. Perhaps that's the new journalism, but that didn't go over well at all with the audience.

    The audience was agitated well before the twitterstorm, it was a room of 2000 people and Lacy seemed to be having this private "in" conversation with Zuckerberg. Her frequent interruptions of Zuckerberg didn't help matters, and when the heckling (which we couldn't hear well, but seemed to start early in the session, not just at the :50 mark) kicked in she lost what little track there was to the questioning.
  • There were a lot of misinterpretations, then. I did not think she was intent on humiliating him. If you knew their background, you'd know they have talked frequently, and if you watch Mark during the interview, he seems pretty relaxed.

    We all have opinions then.

    Liz, I'm not saying this was purely reporter-led revolt against a disliked Lacy. The reporters fed off some discontent they noted from others in the room. I'm saying that there are folks out there, like me, which saw someone in Lacy that was trying really really hard to make it an interesting interview, and if you realize how hard it is to do that with Zuckerberg (who is somewhat reserved), you look at this with different eyes.

    I saw in the all-pervasive Pontin quote a smidgen of misogyny that was actually quite ugly.

    It's too bad Lacy also took it badly at the end, and inadvertently added fuel to the fire.
  • Why should 2000+ people be expected to know that they had a background? Until I'd walked into the session I'd never heard of Sarah Lacy. That alone isn't unusual, but she conducted the interview as though we all knew who she was and that she had been writing a book on facebook. There seemed to be a certain set of assumed knowledge in the audience that just wasn't there. The casual tone just fed the sense that the audience was on the outside somehow.

    She did ask a number of good questions, but they were lost in the way she asked them.