On the heels of the recent stir over the Associated Press filing DMCA notices on the community site Drudge Retort, a timely article in the Washington Post quotes Knight News Challenge winner Geoff Dougherty of Chi-TownDailyNews.org on his vision for the site and professional training models for online journalists.

The article details how bloggers can protect themselves from lawsuits for defamation and libel; Dougherty provides online training for Chi-Town Daily News writers, which will become increasingly important as the author pool and audience share for the Chicago news site grows.

“I see us in five years as the go-to source for Chicago news,” said Dougherty. “It’s a big goal.”

———–

Editor Brad Petit of the Convergence Newsletter at the University of South Carolina recently interviewed Marc Fest, V.P. of Communications at Knight Foundation, about the new online community manager role at Knight Foundation.

Fest describes how an online community manager differs from an editor below:

TCN: How does the online community manager differ from other Web-centric positions? How does it differ from we might traditionally call ‘editors’?

Fest: Online community manager is much more about interacting and communicating with an online community, whereas a traditional position as a webmaster or an editor is more about editing text or maintaining a Web site and running a content-management system. This is very much about interacting with people, it’s about conversation, it’s about two-way interaction and bringing people together and connecting with people.

Read the entire interview here.