New roles for Climate and Environment journalists at The Washington Post

Paulina Firozi

Announcement from Climate and Environment Editor Zachary Goldfarb and Climate and Environment Deputy Editor Juliet Eilperin:

We are delighted to announce that Paulina Firozi has become the Climate & Environment Department’s climate and weather news editor.

With this new assignment, Paulina will continue to work closely with editors and reporters across the department, and especially with the team’s weather reporters, to make our coverage as urgent and relevant as possible. She will focus on finding ways to sharpen how we report on daily weather news, along with extreme weather and natural disaster events across the country and around the globe, so we can capture how our planet is changing.

Since joining the Climate and Environment team in 2022, Paulina has made a particular effort to collaborate with editors across the newsroom during moments of extreme weather. She has helped steer live coverage of natural disasters ranging from Hurricane Ian, which devastated parts of Florida, to the wildfires that tore through Maui last summer. She has worked closely with global weather editor Jason Samenow to help guide and edit daily and enterprise weather coverage and has also edited Kasha Patel’s weekly Hidden Planet column, which covers mystifying and marvelous revelations on Earth and beyond.

Prior to joining Climate, Paulina was a reporter on the General Assignment team, regularly covering natural disasters and mass casualty events — including numerous wildfires in the West, fatal shootings in Michigan and Colorado, and the devastating condo collapse in Surfside, Fla. She also wrote on a growing mental health crisis for teens, the brutal mental and physical toll of the pandemic on nurses, and a rare and very (very) big fish.

She joined The Washington Post in 2017 to be the first researcher for some of the 202 newsletters that launched that year — the Health 202, the Finance 202 and the Energy 202.

Paulina, who grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She spent much of her time there at the student newspaper and served as its editor during her junior year.

Announcement from Climate and Environment Editor Zachary Goldfarb, Climate and Environment Deputy Editor Juliet Eilperin and Climate and Environment Policy Editor Stuart Leavenworth:

Maxine Joselow

We are thrilled to announce that Maxine Joselow is taking on a new assignment, joining the Climate & Environment Department as its climate policy and politics reporter. In this role, she will cover the most powerful players influencing climate and environment, in the United States and worldwide, and the effect those decisions have on all of us.

Maxine came to The Post in September 2021 as the inaugural author of the Climate 202 newsletter. She helped grow the newsletter's audience to more than 100,000 subscribers before its run ended in December.

In addition to the newsletter, Maxine has written several revelatory stories over the past year. She recently investigated the turmoil over racial equity at the Sierra Club, the nation's oldest environmental group. She also wrote a memorable piece about a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has started denying the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. She revealed how Maryland’s governor had tapped a gas lobbyist to serve on a commission regulating the industry, prompting the governor to withdraw the appointment the next day. And she profiled a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission whose offhand comments about gas stoves fueled a culture war. She has also played a key role covering the U.N. climate talks over the past couple of years, in Glasgow and Dubai.

Maxine lives on Capitol Hill with her fiancé, Ben, and her cat, Ollie. In her free time, she enjoys baking cookies and meownaging Ollie's Instagram account.

Maxine started in her new role on Jan. 2. Please join us in congratulating her.