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What happened? Deconstructing the Sarah Lacy Incident

By Lilly Rockwell | Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 03:10 PM

I ran into journalist Sarah Lacy at the Java Jive coffee shop at the Hilton Hotel on Tuesday afternoon.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get her thoughts on what had happened two days ago during her infamous interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in which the crowd turned on her, heckling her with insults like “Ask better questions!”

The interview got so disruptive that Lacy had to surrender to the audience, letting them ask the questions. A stunned Lacy said she had thought the interview was going well.

During our 20-minute conversation, Lacy had an upbeat attitude about what had happened Sunday afternoon, even though, it’s a journalist’s worst nightmare and the blogosphere is still abuzz with what happened.

Several prominent technology Web sites have written comprehensive stories mostly about how she conducted the interview, not about what Zuckerberg had to say. Even publications such as Advertising Age and Wired have written about the dust-up.

It can be tough to be a female business reporter, much less covering technology, Lacy said. This isn’t the first time she has been attacked for “just doing my job.”

At the end of the day, she said you have to shrug off the criticism, and go out and talk to people about what happened.

That’s what she did, she said, at South by Southwest, attending parties and even conducting an interview with Glamour magazine the next day.

Lacy said she had discussed the interview beforehand with Zuckerberg, Facebook officials and South by Southwest organizers.

She said obviously Facebook and South by Southwest wanted someone with a business focus, otherwise they wouldn’t have asked her to come. One of the things Lacy was criticized for was asking too many questions on the business decisions and managing of Facebook.

She also mentioned that she is the only reporter who enjoys close access to Zuckerberg, and that is how she is able to pull answers out of him. She thinks her ability to get Zuckerberg talking was not appreciated enough during the hour-long interview. Zuckerberg is notorious for being a difficult interview, answering in either short sentences or in clunky PR phrases.

Lacy also mentioned that South by Southwest organizers asked her not to take questions from the audience. (Hugh Forrest, SXSW Interative director, says that interpretation is not entirely accurate.) One of the huge frustrations of the event was people in the audience weren’t allowed to ask questions until the last five minutes.

Meanwhile, Lacy said people have come up to her or e-mailed her apologizing for what happened during the interview. She said more people have said nice things to her than negative things, and Robert Scoble, a well-known technology blogger, even apologized to her for things he said on the Web site Twitter during her interview.

After hearing what Lacy had to say, I spoke to Forrest, the SXSW Interactve director, by phone today. He shed some light on what had happened behind the scenes.

He said Facebook and SXSW did collaborate on who to bring as an interviewer of Zuckerberg, but that ultimately it was Facebook’s call.

“I had recommended a bunch of people, journalists I knew in town,” Forrest said. He said they were more comfortable with Lacy. “They felt Mark was more comfortable with (her) and wanted to minimized his discomfort level.”

Forrest said he wished there had been more publicity and press about what Zuckerberg actually said during the wide-ranging interview, instead of Lacy.

“In retrospect, there are a million things we wish we did differently,” he said.

For instance, he said he would have networked more with Lacy beforehand.

“Afterward, I talked to Facebook and asked them if they had done this, gone over all the details with Sarah, if they had done that,” Forrest said. “It is just one of those planning things where it seemed right.”

As far as whether SXSW organizers asked Lacy not to ask questions, Forrest said all he said was “Let’s be clear that Facebook is comfortable asking questions.”

“I was disappointed because we got a lot of publicity, but for all the wrong reasons,” Forrest said. “Wish it had gone better, but it didn’t. We live and learn.”

The heckling might scare away more people like Zuckerberg from coming to speak at South by Southwest, Lacy had told me. I asked Forrest about this.

“I hope not,” he said. “It was great to have him involved,” he said. “He certainly brought us a lot of attention before that we might not have had.”

He pointed out that Frank Warren’s Post Secret keynote was received enthusiastically the next day, and audience members left moved by the emotional speech.

He added that what happened during the keynote was in the spirit of SXSW Interactive. “In the past, three years ago, five, twenty years ago, this type of reaction would have taken three or four hours. Now we have the technology that it’s absolute real time. People are connecting with other people who are frustrated,” Forrest said.

“The rules of engagement are changing with this new technology,” he added. “Maybe that is the big point to be taken away from all of this.”

I thought our conversation was done, but Forrest called back 10 minutes later.

He wanted to add a point: that Zuckerberg was a big speaker for them, and the crowd was excited and nervous to see him on a level that SXSW Interactive wasn’t used to.

People packed into two ballrooms, with folks standing and sitting on the floor in the main room.

“We never had the amount of energy and nervousness on a speech as the thing with Mark,” Forrest said. “To some degree, that may have negatively impacted the presentation.”

“Everyone in this event would love to be in his (Zuckerberg’s) position,” he said, “being young, able to dictate the terms of what you are going to do, and how that is going to change the Internet. Plus, he doesn’t talk that much to the public, and they wanted to see if he was going to say anything.”

To those who bothered to listen, he did.

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