If Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy was looking to inject herself into the story when she interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, she succeeded. According to reports from the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Lacy repeatedly interrupted Zuckerberg and seemed intent on telling embarrassing anecdotes about how shy Zuckerberg was when he first met the press.
At one point, Lacy related a “mildly humiliating story” about an interview with Zuckerberg and asked him if he could say more than two words at a time, to which he replied, “That’s really hard.” There were other incidents where Lacy related “’embarrassing story about another time when I interviewed Mark’ anecdotes,” according to a reporter’s blog about the event in Austin, Texas.
The audience rebelled against Lacy’s antics, leading her to make defensive remarks from the stage. “Try doing what I do for a living,” she said at one point. “It’s not that easy.”
This being South by Southwest, many audience members were reporting the debacle on Twitter.com. “Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview,” audience member Jason Pontin commented.
Despite Lacy, Zuckerberg had some things to say, mostly in response to questions from the audience.
He talked about Facebook in terms of a world-changing mission. “There are a lot of really big issues with the world that need to be solved,” he said, “and what we’re doing as a company is basically building an infrastructure on which some of those problems can be solved.”
“Why does there need to be a big organization in order to channel peoples’ voices?” he asked. “Communication should be efficient enough that these people should have a voice, and issues that are important to these people should be able to be heard.”
Zuckerberg said he sees Facebook as part of the “solid base” of communications,…