Rebecca Daugherty

As the director of the FOI Service Center at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press until early in 2006, Rebecca Daugherty answered thousands of FOI questions from reporters every year.

She created the template for “Tapping Officials’ Secrets,” a guide to finding government information, and talked major open-government attorneys from across the country into “writing the book” on state open-government laws.

Daugherty regularly updated “How to Use the Federal FOI Act,” as well. Frequently an officer in the American Society of Access Professionals, including a stint as its president, she trained journalists and FOI officers on how FOI could be made to work better. She wrote comments on federal proposals that endorsed secrecy, answered questions from legislative staffs seeking to either open or close information and tracked open government foibles daily for various Reporters Committee projects.

She worked for more than a decade as an FOI specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, and brought to her FOI work experience as news reporter on the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune and as a copy editor on the Metro-East Journal in East St. Louis, Ill.

Daugherty studied under the University of Missouri’s Hall of Famers Paul Fisher and the late dean, Earl English, who created the FOI Center at Missouri. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Missouri and a juris doctorate from the University of Missouri – Kansas City.