I’m afraid that I’ve let distractions like Emperor’s Club Client 9 and the Fed’s new Term Securities Lending Facility keep me from writing until now about the Most Important Story in the Whole World–journalist Sarah Lacy‘s troubled Q&A with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at the SXSW Interactive Conference Sunday.
It started with a bunch of disgruntled Twitters during the Q&A. Then came catcalls from the audience, some awkward fight-back by Lacy and, afterwards, a cataclysmic flood of blogospheric recrimination about Lacy’s hair-twirling, among other things, followed by defenses from heavyweights Michael Arrington, Owen Thomas, and Kara Swisher. There’s no self-involvement like Silicon Valley self-involvement, eh?
I initially learned about this epoch-making event from a CNet story that showed up in my e-mail inbox. My first thought was that tech journalists do sometimes get very big for their britches very quickly, and maybe Lacy (she used to write for Business Week and now has a videoblog on Yahoo! Finance and a book coming out in May about the rebirth of Silicon Valley; plus, Nick Denton thinks she’s “smoking” hot) had committed the great moderator sin of talking about herself too much.
But then I started watching the video of the event made by Facebook obsessive Nick O’Neill. Lacy seemed to start off really well, with quick, smart questions and very little bloviation. It was only much, much later that she ran into trouble. Thirty-nine minutes later (no, I didn’t watch all 39; I relied on the helpful annotations along the bottom of the video to guide my viewing).
Which explains the problem right there: That is way, way too long for any audience–especially an audience heavy on bloggers and others who think their opinions are really really important–to sit and listen to some journalist ask a guy questions. I do the occasional panel-moderating gig myself, and I generally think the cutoff should be at about 15-20 minutes, after which you move to questions from the audience. If not sooner.
Now I guess Lacy should have realized this, but I’d put most of the blame on the organizers of the event for not making that an explicit part of the format. I don’t know of any interviewer on the planet who could keep an hour-long stage interview engaging without some kind of audience interaction. So take heart, Sarah Lacy: Oriana Fallaci would have gotten catcalls at SXSW, too.