Nov. 13, #FollowFriday

I attended an interesting conference at CUNY (that's City University of New York) this week and got to meet some interesting folks focused on hyperlocal journalism on the web. As someone tweeted during the conference, it was nice to be around a group of journalists (old-school and new) who wanted to find solutions rather than just pointing fingers and complaining about everything.Trust me, I worked in newsrooms for 20 years and journos LOVE to complain. The fact that there were this many journalists in a room and there were actually people discussing solutions and not just bitching about problems is no small thing.There were a couple people there who I've known for quite some time online but had never met in person, as well as a former colleague and a couple of folks I met for the first time, so I thought I'd do another themed Follow Friday post, "I have met these people IRL."• DigiDave: I've followed David Cohn online for a year or more now, since around the time he won a Knight Foundation grant for his Spot.Us project - crowdfunded journalism. The project got its first piece published in the New York Times in the past week, no mean feat, and is about ready to launch its second iteration, in Los Angeles (the project started in San Francisco). Dave's pretty active on lots of social media sites, and our commonality as journalists brought us into the same orbit now and again. He's really on the forefront of the journalism revolution and is one to watch.• StandupKid: I'm not sure how I stumbled across Mark Joyella. I think we had some mutual friends and I saw his tweets about the journalism industry, as it implodes around us. But we've followed and retweeted each other for months now and it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before we crossed paths in real life, seeing as we're both in the NYC metro area. So when I saw him tweeting from the CUNY conference, I knew we had to meet up. He's from the broadcast side of things and is as cynical about the broadcast side of the industry as I am about the newspaper side. He's always sharing interesting links and observations, definitely worth a look.• TurkeyMonkey: I still don't completely know why this is Ted Mann's online identity, but it definitely is memorable. Ted and I worked together for a while at The Journal News/LoHud.com, before he went off to become Digital Development Director for Gannett New Jersey. One of the few people from the print side of things who got the digital side, he's unleashed his ideas for hyperlocal journalism on the family of Gannett newspapers in New Jersey. And I now know about SeeClickFix.com because of him.• SeeClickFix: You know that pothole down the street from you, the one that's almost destroyed the front axle in your car every day for the past year? If you report it on SeeClickFix, it might actually get fixed. Seriously, you report the problem, people vote on the importance of it being solved - graffiti, potholes, broken signs or traffic signals, whatever - and, apparently, the powers that be pay attention. Cool beans. Met the CEO, Ben Berkowitz, at CUNY.