I confess I have never been to South by Southwest. However, the beauty of any conference attended by obsessive bloggers is that you can follow the fun online wherever you are.
Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a few tweets regarding Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Sarah, a tech reporter for BusinessWeek, was universally panned — not necessarily for the content of the questions she asked, or for the answers she was able to squeeze out of the notoriously hard-to-read Zuckerberg. (As she notes from her Twitter account: in my book, getting mark to publicly admit to the yahoo deal, address beacon, and give news on changes in the platform and france equals successful interview.)
From where I sit, there seem to be two critique threads emerging:
1. She didn’t involve the crowd enough. In an audience teeming with bloggers hungry to ask their own questions, she held off opening the floor for a Q&A until the final ten minutes, an inarguably bad move.
2. Her interview style was more flirtatious than journalistic. This is the meme I find more troubling. Apparently instead of going for Zuckerberg’s jugular, she engaged him in a two-way conversation, often cutting him off to make a point. In the words of this commenter on the CNET post recapping the debacle, Sarah opted to play the “let me pretend to be your girlfriend” trick. She killed the substance of her questions by picking the wrong approach to posing them.
The commenter goes on to raise the larger question the tech establishment should be asking itself:
This points to love/hate relationship that geeks have with the women who try to invade their territory. Treat them with respect and genuinely act as one of them, and you get treated like Veronica Belmont or Cali Lewis. Fail to do this, and you get treated like Sarah Lacy.
There’s a whole category on Valleywag devoted to Valley Foxes — of whom Smoking Sarah Lacy is one. It’s easy to see that Sarah Lacy’s reputation as a “flirtational” reporter preceded her. Was this SXSWi keynote a disaster waiting to happen? Why did it catch anyone by surprise? And, if she really did get the goods from Zuckerberg, does it really matter how she did it?
I’ll leave the sexist subtext for another blogger to tease out of this story. (Exhibit A: Dig a Tech Girl). In the meantime, I await Sarah Lacy’s official, non-Twittered response.
Updated: Looks like Sarah’s BusinessWeek cohorts have her back: Facebook CEO Admits Missteps totally sidesteps the controversy. The lines separating journalism and PR just got a little blurrier…
Updated again: The video emerges. I haven’t watched it and probably won’t get to until much later in the day. I wonder if what I see will totally undermine this blog post.
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