Mike Oliver

Mike Oliver, 54, has come full circle back to Alabama where he started his career. Hired by the Birmingham News in 1982 out of Auburn University, Oliver left in 1987 to work for the Orlando Sentinel in Central Florida. He spent a dozen years there which included covering an earlier iteration of health reform under the Clinton administration. In 2000, he went to work for the Oakland Tribune in the San Francisco Bay area where he spent 10 years as a regional editor and projects editor. The lure of his homeland in the South brought him back to the Birmingham News and Alabama Media Group in 2011. He and his wife, Catherine, a Presbyterian pastor, have three grown daughters, Hannah, Emily and Claire.

Proposal: How Alabama's political decisions affect people (especially the poor) and health care.