Two weeks ago I was sitting on a long bus ride between New York City and DC when I noticed several people I follow on Twitter checking into the PBS documentary Prohibition on GetGlue. GetGlue is a social networking site that allows users to “check in” to media they’re consuming in real time. The site provides a platform for viewers to discuss the shows they’re watching, giving them points and stickers as rewards. Users are often encouraged to share their check-ins and viewing habits by posting to their social streams on both Facebook and Twitter. According to a blog post the company published last month, GetGlue saw 11.7 million check-ins from its users during August alone. And it “now has over 1.5M users and has a database of over 200M ratings, reviews, and check-ins.”

Prohibition, the much-anticipated Ken Burns documentary about the 13-year ban on the sale and manufacturing of alcohol, has garnered over 28,000 check-ins and more than 4,600 “Likes” to date. On the night of my bus ride, it ranked among the top ten shows, with more check-ins than The Simpsons. Kevin Dando, PBS’ director of digital marketing and communications, told me in a phone interview that those numbers are a reflection of PBS’ heavy involvement with GetGlue and other social media platforms. “There are several different stickers that people can get with Prohibition,” Dando said. “You get one for checking in and watching a preview, you get ones for each of the three episodes, and then there’s one for people who have watched all three nights.”

Why does CNN trounce all its competitors on the web? AdWeek took a stab at this question a year ago, suggesting that it might have to do with the demographics of CNN viewers and the idea that Fox News’ brand of opinionated journalism doesn’t automatically work well on the web. “People shouting at each other doesn’t translate to a mass audience online,” a source told AdWeek’s Mike Shields. But Meredith Artley, the managing editor of CNN.com, told me in a phone interview that the network owes its online success to what she calls the “Pilates strategy.”

“What that means, as someone who has friends who do Pilates but has never done it herself, is that it’s about strengthening your core and stretching into new areas,” she said.

The core, as she sees it, is breaking news. “But that’s not enough; you can’t do just that alone. You have to go beyond that. To that end, you have to stretch into new areas and try new things and innovate and play and experiment.”

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Chas Danner was one of the many annoyed by Gregory’s comment. As a 31-year-old undergraduate journalism student in NYC, Danner is a regular reader of Rosen’s and not long ago set off to find out whether there was a Facebook group trying to pressure Gregory to change his mind. “This would be a pretty easy thing to get a group going to help pressure Meet the Press,” he told me during a phone interview. “And so I went on and it turns out there was already a group started by this guy named Paul Breer. All I knew about him is that he’s a guy from Kansas. So I joined the group, made a couple quick graphics and then gave him some advice.”

Those back-and-forth messages led to the formation of Meet the Facts, which describes itself as a “non-partisan grassroots effort to encourage the NBC television program Meet The Press to incorporate a formal fact checking procedure for all statements made on air by its guests.” Though the main gist of its effort is to get NBC to take this burden upon itself, this week the group published a detailed analysis of the most recent Meet the Press episode, weighing the accuracy of the assertions on the show much in the same way as you’ll see Politifact and Factcheck.org assess statements. “We got a volunteer who emailed us and said, ‘if you need help, let me know,’” Danner said. “And he ended up being great helping us do research, and the three of us looked over the episode, tried to find stuff to check, and went out and dug into it.”

This task, they found out, was not easy. Danner estimated that between the three of them it took 12 hours to research and he spent the better part of a day trying to format it into a digestible blog post. It turns out that fact-checking an episode is a time-consuming process, which is especially important when you consider that all three were doing so without getting paid. If the group wants to continue this from week to week, they’ll likely have to amass more volunteers and devise an efficient way to split up the work.

Understandably, Danner would like to hand off much of this work to a third-party group, perhaps a university journalism program, and he’s open to anyone who wishes to team up with the group. He said it’s up in the air right now whether they’ll actually be able to fact check every week, so this is why the main thrust of Meet the Facts is to get Meet the Press to take its own initiative in organizing a fact checking organization, either from an outside group (what Danner prefers) or in-house.

“I think that’s certainly the essential goal right now, to get as many people as possible to take action, and do whatever they can and get [Meet the Press and other Sunday shows] to change course. This isn’t a hard sell, it’s a pretty simple thing. And beyond that, if Meet the Facts needs to turn into some kind of counterpoint to Meet the Press, where we provide that service, I think we’re ready to take it to that level. But it’s a matter of finding the resources, the human resources … I don’t imagine my life’s calling is to fact check Meet the Press forever, but this may change the culture of Sunday talk shows.”

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The only difference, of course, is that the right blogosphere was able to seize upon one particularly large error while the left had to settle for a series of incremental ones, making credit harder to assign. While they certainly lobbed quite a few stones, the right was able to use a catapult to bring down the entire fortress wall in one fell swoop.

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I predict a lot of schadenfreude in the conservative blogosphere today. They kept he issue alive for weeks after it happened, and permanently tarnished Roesgen’s reputations until she was likely viewed as damaged goods.

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At about 8:45 a.m., Watters walked out on to his driveway with his wife, Noelle, and we hopped out to talk to him. When Watters ambushes people, he rushes at them in a deliberate attempt to rattle them, and asks hostile questions. Not being complete dicks, we decided to approach it differently. We introduced ourselves, said hello, and calmly approached him. He got in his car and drove away. We could have engaged some of the tactics that Fox has used in these situations—by say, running to meet him at his car and positioning ourselves so that he couldn’t close the door—but we didn’t want to, because we weren’t trying to engineer a confrontation. We were trying to engineer an interview.

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