Mark Schleifstein retired at the end of 2024 as an environment reporter for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate | NOLA.com, and a member of its four-person environment reporting team.
In 2025, he is advising that newspaper’s environment reporting team and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a journalism collaborative covering the nation’s largest watershed.
He also continues to serve on the advisory board of SciLine, a service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps reporters on deadline contact scientists who have been vetted for their research and their ability to talk to journalists. As a member and former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, he also moderates that organization’s main listserve, SEJ-Talk. He also is a member of the board of directors of the Press Club of New Orleans, having served three terms as its president and receiving its lifetime achievement award.
He also will be writing freelance stories on environmental issues.
Schleifstein's stories on Hurricane Katrina were among the Times-Picayune's stories honored with 2006 Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service and Breaking News Reporting. He's the co-author of the 2006 book, "Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms," about Katrina. He’s co-author of the award-winning 2002 series, "Washing Away," which warned that New Orleans could be flooded by hurricane storm surge. He also was co-author of the 1996 series, "Oceans of Trouble: Are the World's Fisheries Doomed?", which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Two other series he co-authored were Pulitzer finalists: "Home Wreckers: How the Formosan termite is devastating New Orleans," published in 1998, for national reporting; and "Louisiana in Peril," about the state’s petrochemical industry, published in 1991, for explanatory journalism. A number of his other stories for The Times-Picayune and The Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger have won both national and local awards.
He worked for The Times-Picayune, then owned by Advance Publications, between 1984 and 2019, when the paper was shuttered, and between July 2019 and the end of 2024 worked for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, which is the renamed New Orleans edition of the Baton Rouge-based The Advocate. Prior to that, he worked for five years for the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger; four years for the Norfolk, Va., The Virginian-Pilot; and one year for the Suffolk, Va., News Herald. Mark is a member of the board of directors of Shir Chadash Conservative Congregation and heads its team of lay service leaders. He has two grown children and four grandchildren.
