Janon Fisher is a news editor at DNAinfo, overseeing breaking news, investigations and Harlem coverage.

He moved to New York from Puerto Rico in 1996 and started his career covering community news in Manhattan for $18,000 a year. He then moved on to high speed train technology, but found the beat to be a bit limited in the United States, and fell back into community news, this time covering Queens.

Janon watched many politicians go to federal prison in the three years he spent covering North Jersey and, as vice president of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, help pass a sweeping overhaul of the Garden State’s public records act. After 9/11, he uncovered the story of South Asian and Middle Eastern men being held in indefinite detention in New Jersey’s county jails.

He has worked for nearly every major city daily, including three years at The New York Times, four years at the New York Post and two years at the Daily News.

He has obsessively pushed to open public records in state and federal court, sometimes successfully. His legal brief was cited by a Brooklyn federal judge in his decision to unseal a plea agreement between the Department of Justice and Najibullah Zazi, a man who plotted to kill New Yorkers in Manhattan’s Midtown subway stations.

FUN FACT: His push for open records has seldom been popular with government officials and in 2013 it was revealed that he was listed as one of the FBI’s most vexsome public records requesters.