For those that have somehow not heard about it for now, Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently. Many people were really looking forward to it (Mark doesn’t seem to talk much so it was a rare chance), and when all was said and done the usual descriptions of the interview were along the lines of  “trainwreck“, “crumbles into chaos“, and “benchmark for remarkable badness“. The fingers weren’t pointing at Mark. Ouch.

The gist of what happened is that people really didn’t like Lacy’s interview style, didn’t like her questions (or lack of questions), they didn’t think she knew her audience, didn’t like the way she self-promoted and tried to keep the spotlight on herself (i.e. It’s the CEO of Facebook! Let him talk!), didn’t like the “Mrs. Robinson” thing they thought they were seeing… then the crowd started getting pretty hostile letting her know they didn’t like her approach, and then things got kind of out of hand, she was yelling out how hard her job is… you get the idea. Not the best interview. You can read about it on any of the links above, but this cartoon captures some of it quite nicely. If you don’t know what Twitter is, check it out yourself.

I was originally leaning towards staying away from this topic all together  – it seemed that the insults were being taken way to far, and the coverage has been a bit of overkill. However, I did want to point readers toward’s Jeff Jarvis’ very thoughtful analysis of what went wrong. It’s kind of an interesting mixture of all the “old” rules of journalism that still apply, and any new ones that are emerging because of new technologies, being shattered simutaneously.

There are two key posts. The one you might want to read first is this one. It includes a YouTube clip of Lacy’s post-interview response after things were blowing up… it might give you some understanding of why people keep piling on her a bit. She doesn’t EXACTLY take any blame or say she messed anything up, and she sure points a few fingers. To quote Jarvis, she’s emblematic of bigger problems in our craft: She refuses to hear the feedback she got. Worse, she doesn’t seek it out. (there is also a now infamous Twitter message she floated out there along the lines of “seriously, screw you guys”).

The second is a little more detailed, and is simply entitled what went wrong. The main point is that she didn’t know her audience, because she didn’t bother to ask them what they wanted. And actually, I’m going to throw in one more from Rex Hammock, which is particularly pertinant for interviewers in this day and age:

If you bomb in front of 2,000 people and 1,500 of them have blogs and Twitter accounts, don’t try to convince them that you didn’t bomb.

Excellent point. Oh right – if you do have some interest in what Mark said about Facebook, in the context of how the interview was going as reported by someone who was there, this is a great spot to go.