Lets set the stage.
Sara Lacy, a journalist for Businessweek, was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg for a keynote at SXSW, a conference in Austin,Texas.
The audience wanted her to ask hard questions (Beacon, Privacy, the woes of the Facebook platform). Instead, she delivered what has been described in no uncertain terms as a terrible interview. The audience got upset, and the blogosphere (along with Wired and CNET) erupted.
Quite a scene, if you go by what has been described.
A Leslie Stahl Moment
Take an objective measure of the event, and it starts reading like a storm in a teacup. Especially when you realize how many bad interviews go unnoticed on a daily basis, and how many hecklers preen and paw at reporters during the course of their jobs.
The big problems, if there were any, were that Sara didn’t understand her audience well enough to prepare the right questions, and Mark was over prepared to dodge answering anything that might have been interesting to the SXSW crowd.
In combination, you end up bored crowd of people with a vested interest in hearing something new about Mark’s Billion dollar pet project. When they learned that it wasn’t happening, some of them lashed out.
Should we be giving this story as much ink as it has received?
Maybe, but not for the reasons that everyone seems to be focused on. What this should show us is that as a journalist, especially one operating in the micro-culture that is Web 2.0, you have to be extremely aware of who your audience is.
If your job is to communicate in a way that they can resonate with, you need to focus your efforts on doing just that.
No one thinks it’s easy, but that’s why you signed on to do it, isn’t it?
(RSS)
This post is tagged
No Comments