I know how it feels to have a shitty interview, but total denial is not a good public face.

- sxsw has high profile people every year; ever heard of Dan Rather, Malcolm Gladwell
- there wasn’t a few people in back causing problems, the whole crowd was horrified.
- sxsw is NOT a developer conference, only a small portion of the panels have ‘CSS’ or ‘AJAX’ in the titles…

It was that bad. It wasn’t just a few trolls in the back of the room. It was the entire audience.

What you can’t see on the recorded video is that people started leaving after 30 minutes. People were moaning and talking amongst themselves after 20 minutes.

There were 8 cameras there. I wish 2 would have been on them and the remaining 6 would have been pointed on the audience. Then those people that weren’t there could see how uncomfortable everyone one was.

The crowd gave her the benefit of the doubt for over 45 minutes and then finally had enough when Zuckerberg said to her, “You have to ask a question.” At that point, the crowd jumped to it’s feet and applauded for 45 seconds.

And the above video proves what we in the audience all learned that day, she doesn’t have a clue about who her audience was. And while she may be able to conduct written interviews that go through a tremendous amount of editing and rewrites, she’s not mature enough or quick on her feet to deal with an audience in real time.

What like his like um like the Zuckerberg like in his like pants like, like?

Like this girl just broke my like, brain, I think.

Nice work Lacy, I thought I was the only self-absorbed, jelly donut making, kitty cat lickin’, panty hose wearin’, pee drinkin’ person on this earth.

It’s like were like soul like partners or like something, I think like this is a great post right?

Sarah Lacy lacks any understanding of why her interview was the God-awful train wreck that it was — quite possibly the worst interview conducted in the history of humankind. She was grotesquely unprofessional in her attempt to appear “chummy” with Zuckerberg. It appeared she was too caught up in trying to appear “cool” to the hip Tech crowd and underestimated the level of respect and professionalism we expected from her. She opened with a story about how nervous he was when they first met and called him out on sweaty pit stains. Lacy continued to flirt, twirl her hair and giggle like a school girl throughout the interview - her body language (bouncy, bobbing, crossed legs and all!) was like she was at a bar picking up Mr.-hot-young-thang.

By her playful jabs, she came off as patronizing and condescending towards the young CEO and seemed to think SHE was the star of the show as THE JOURNALIST who gets to interview THE FACE of Facebook. And, at the end, she continued to drive the train by acting on her visibly, deeply, hurt feelings by continuing her immature behavior - she refused to let certain people ask questions because they heckled her (’No - YOU don’t get one because YOU heckled me!’). The best course of action might have been to apologize to the crowd for whatever reason we were displeased, dropped it and continued with a Q&A WITHOUT incessantly commenting sarcastically on her ‘awful interview’. And attempting to go for the ‘poor journalist has a hard job’ angle.

This was not because of the so-called “Twitteratti”. I was not on Twitter but I was at the keynote, live, jaw-dropped and gawking at the ridiculous show, along with most of the crowd. Many left early in disgust. There were plenty of people NOT on Twitter but, the general sense of appallment was shared both on and offline.

Lacy calls herself a Tech reporter yet appears to have little to no understanding of her audience and industry language. I agree that this was NOT the venue to ask Zuckerberg why one can’t sort through their messages on Facebook (Seriously, dude - you get ONE question for this industry leader and you b*tch about the primitive messaging system?? It’s called E-MAIL. USE E-MAIL.). However, if she had led the hour with professionalism and respect for both Zuckerberg and the audience, the masses would not have turned on her. We weren’t looking for: ‘Yeah cool dude, let’s hang out and talk about all the sweet stuff you’re doing on the ‘book! And yeah, Zucky - you’re SO cute, OMG! Zucky and I are buds and I got to write a book all about him, woohoo!’ But, sadly, that’s what we got.

And the grand finale? Telling everyone on Twitter to “screw” the following day. Mature, Ms.Journalist. I think she’s going to need to change industries.

Not only that, they worked together on them.

This is quite counter to most journalistic polities.