Challen Stephens, senior news director and investigative editor for AL.com and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, has taken on a national role as Director of Investigations for Advance Local.

Stephens will continue to lead AL.com’s investigative team, which expanded in 2022 to become one of the largest teams of investigative journalists in the southeast. In his new role, he will work with markets across Advance Local to identify opportunities for collaboration.

Stephens has worked for Advance Local in Alabama for nearly 30 years, starting at The Huntsville Times in 1995. He spent decades covering education, criminal justice and politics in Alabama. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he spent a year as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and earned a masters degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

In 2021, Stephens was a lead reporter on the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Mauled, an examination of the severity of widespread injuries from police K9s.

He was also the editor on two, year-long, projects for AL.com that each earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. One was for local reporting – with him as editor and reporters John Archibald, Ashley Remkus, and Ramsey Archibald – that exposed a corrupt police department in the small city of Brookside, Ala. The other was as editor for a commentary series State of Denial by AL.com columnist Kyle Whitmire that examined how Alabama’s legacy on race affects the state today.

Stephens’ reporting on police and schools also won numerous other honors over the years, including awards from IRE, EWA and the White House Correspondents Association.