Laura McGann is an assistant editor at the Lab. She was the founding managing editor, and later editor, of the nonprofit national news and politics site The Washington Independent. Before that she covered, among other things, Alaska political scandal for TPMMuckraker. She worked the bankruptcy beat for Dow Jones, where many of her stories were picked up by The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. A story McGann broke about an anti-terrorism data mining program run by the Department of Education and the FBI was inspiration for her dog’s name, FOIA. Email: lkmcgann@niemanlab.org.