Washington Post appoints Schemm deputy regional editor

The following excerpt announcement was sent out by The Washington Post foreign editor Douglas Jehl and deputy foreign editor Eva Rodriguez:

We are thrilled to announce that Paul Schemm will become a deputy regional editor in Foreign, based in London, where he will serve as the primary assignment editor driving daily coverage from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and South Asia during the early hours of the D.C. day.

In this role, Paul will be a key partner to our hubs in Seoul and London. He will work closely with our correspondents while coordinating closely on coverage with the teams in Seoul and in London.

Paul previously served as Foreign’s overnight editor in Ethiopia and as news editor for Europe and the Middle East in Dubai. In those roles, he established a model for improved round-the-clock coverage that we are replicating with the hubs by relying on deployed editors to work directly with correspondents during daytime hours in Asia and Europe.

The new role expands Paul’s responsibilities: He will be responsible for elevating coverage of the most significant stories emerging from Europe, Middle East, Africa and South Asia overnight as he works with correspondents to build ~out~ early iterations and then add the necessary sweep, scope and analysis.

Paul will be the primary partner to Foreign’s Middle East, Europe and South Asia/Africa editors who, as regional editors, will retain overall responsibility for setting priorities and driving coverage. He will also step in regularly as a fill-in regional editor, taking responsibility for these teams when others are away.

Paul is a veteran Middle East reporter and editor. He began his career in Cairo, as an assistant managing editor for Middle East Insight and the Middle East Times and later as top editor of Cairo Times magazine. He also worked as a Cairo-based analyst for the Oxford Business Group. He joined Agence France-Presse in 2005, working from Baghdad and Cairo, and then moved to the Associated Press’s Cairo bureau in 2007 before landing in Rabat, Morocco. He joined The Post in 2016 in a part-time role from Addis Ababa and expanded that into full-time responsibilities a year later.

Paul graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in political science and the University of Texas at Austin, with an M.A. in Middle East studies.