Magazine

When bedbugs became news: Public service does not equal journalism

By Bill Krueger. Originally published 15/10/10 by Poynter Online

For three years, hardly anyone noticed the quirky little web site Maciej Ceglowski created to keep track of bedbugs.
That was fine with Ceglowski, because it was more of a personal matter to him after bedbugs bit him one night in a Travelodge in San Francisco.

“It was good psychological therapy for me to get back at the bedbug,” Ceglowski told me in a recent interview.

But bedbugs are in the news these days, with numerous reports about a rise in infestations nationwide in apartment buildings, hotels and other buildings. And suddenly Ceglowski’s website, bedbugregistry.com, is not so little anymore.

At the beginning of the year, Ceglowski’s website might have had 3,000 visitors a day and 20 reports of bedbug sightings. Now, the site gets up to 40,000 visitors and 100 new reports a day. (That’s down from a peak of 50,000 visitors a day in August.)

Intended or not, bedbugregistry.com has become a source of news. For some, it’s an example of the potential of crowdsourcing, where thousands of anecdotal reports come together to identify clusters of bedbugs in cities around the country. That relies on the assumption, though, that the information reported is accurate. And that gives some people pause.

Ceglowski says public health officials have called his site irresponsible, and hotel owners have threatened to sue him for allowing people to anonymously report the names of hotels where they claim bedbugs were found. Gawker has mocked the site.

Ceglowski, a 35-year-old freelance computer programmer who lives in San Francisco, does not consider himself a journalist. Journalists, he says, go out and gather information and then use that information to tell a story. “I sit in my underpants and have a database that fills up,” he said.

But Ceglowski is careful to preserve his independence. There are ads on his site, but they are handled by Google. “So I have no say in what ads will run on the site, except for the ability to turn off ads altogether if I choose,” Ceglowski told me in an e-mail. “I like this arrangement because it puts me at arm’s length from sponsors.”

Read the rest of this article at Poynter Online

Tags: bedbegs, blog, blogging, citizen, crowdsourcing, journalism, online, poynter,

Related articles

• Young journalist becomes Facebook hit during Romanian protests
• What type of journalist are you? A fighter, a disc jockey, or a waiter?
• Can a journalist be forced to name a confidential source?
• How to survive as a journalist in Somalia
• Drone journalism takes off
• 18DaysInEgypt: a pioneering storytelling platform to document Egypt’s revolution
• Immersive journalism and a step forward for virtual reality
• Will the scramble for photojournalists to learn video be worth it?
• Building Bridges: U.S.-Pakistan Professional Partnership in Journalism
• Lessons learnt at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

• Home |
• Seminars  |
• Events |
• Media Landscape |
• Newsroom|
• Media News|
• Resources

Terms of service and Privacy policy.

Copyright © 1992- 2011 European Journalism Centre. All rights reserved.

Valid XHTML and CSS.

European Journalism Centre

Sonneville-lunet 10
6221KT Maastricht
The Netherlands

Tel. : +31 43 325 40 30
Fax : +32 2 400 42 20

E-mail: info[at]ejc.net