John Archibald is a journalist, currently writing a weekly column for AL.com and the Birmingham News (Huntsville Times and Mobile Press Register).Archibald began working for the Alabama News in the 1980s, and he was a government reporter, an investigative reporter, and a database editor for the paper before becoming a columnist in 2004.Archibald won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2018. His first book, the family memoir "Shaking the Gates of Hell," was published in 2021. In 2020 he was awarded a Nieman Foundation fellowship at Harvard University in order to study how media stories shape public perceptions of crime and a "culture of fear."