Imran
http://imran.TV

I share most of your opinions and was similarly moved to post about it this morning. (Link is on my name.) You and I are the only ones in over 20 posts I’ve read that gives some of the responsibility for this mismanagement to the organizers at SXSW.

Great opportunity to learn from and get reminders for future related events. In a week it will mostly have blown by, but I would hope that upcoming speakers and interviewers would not try to emulate her style.

I wonder: Was Ms. Lacy representing any organization in her role as interviewer?

The beginning and end of your relevancy to this discussion, Susan. Lacy’s not much of a journalist, from what I can tell from her work, and clearly she practices the brand of vapid, ethically questionable self-promotion which we see all too often with journos these days.

But you’re just as bad, at least in view of the above quote, by my lights. There’s no place in journalism for the sort of Kool Aid-drinking, flackish fawning over an interview subject that you seem to promote. Particularly when interviewing a powerful public figure like Zuckerberg, the journalist’s role ought to be adversarial. (Interviewing someone who’s just lost their house in a hurricane? Not so much. Circumstances matter.)

But the mistakes made here were not that Lacy didn’t feed the audience the particular flavor of pap they were demanding, or that she was ‘confrontational’ with Zuckerberg (she wasn’t confrontational enough), or that she didn’t kowtow with the requisite knee-scraping obsequiousness to the Merchant-Warrior-Poet-King of Facebook.

The mistake for Lacy was in agreeing to do this Faceflack-conceived bullsh*t ‘fireside chat’ in the first place. Your subjects can’t be your friends if you want to call yourself a journalist. New Media has supposedly made that rule obsolete. But much as the Dot-Commers’ New Economy was supposed to have rewritten basic rules of business viability, it’s baloney.

I expect there will be many more of these debacles in our brave new media world. And if this ‘trainwreck’ is any indication, future iterations will also leave everyone involved - the hacks, the flacks, the Twittertards, the Monday Morning QBs - significantly stupider by their having transpired.