How The Wall Street Journal Covered Evan Gershkovich’s Imprisonment in Russia
For more than a year, the top of The Wall Street Journal’s website has featured prominent coverage of the imprisonment of Evan Gershkovich, one of the news organization’s reporters. His image and the words #IStandWithEvan appear on a large screen in The Journal’s New York newsroom. Colleagues wear “I Stand With Evan” T-shirts and “Free Evan” pins.
The maneuvering behind the international prisoner swap on Thursday, involving Mr. Gershkovich and around two dozen others, was far outside the bounds of what The Wall Street Journal could do to help him. But since Russia imprisoned Mr. Gershkovich in March 2023, The Journal has pushed to keep his detainment top of mind.
The organization has operated letter-writing campaigns, launched social media blitzes and staged a 24-hour read-a-thon of Mr. Gershkovich’s reporting. Colleagues across the world took part in runs on the first anniversary of his arrest, while employees in New York plunged into the cold waters at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn for a swim event.
“After an initial flurry of attention in the weeks following Evan’s arrest, keeping the spotlight on his ordeal became a huge challenge for the newsroom amid jam-packed news cycles,” Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of The Journal, told The New York Times in an email earlier this year.
“We used every grim milestone as a moment to organize publicity and get Evan back into the headlines: 100 days, his birthday in October, 250 days, every one of his court appearances,” she wrote.
The Journal has continuously and strenuously denied the espionage charges against Mr. Gershkovich, saying he was an accredited journalist doing his job.
His arrest happened just five weeks after Ms. Tucker began her tenure as The Journal’s top editor. The Journal set up a dedicated section on its website featuring news updates on Mr. Gershkovich. It also has a counter logging the number of days since he had been arrested and it included resources for writing messages of support to Mr. Gershkovich and his family.
In October, The Journal moved its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, into a new role to work full time on securing Mr. Gershkovich’s release.
Mr. Gershkovich’s family members, who live in the United States, are in regular contact with The Journal, which has helped to coordinate their interviews with the media.
On March 29, to mark his year of detainment, The Journal wrapped its newspaper in a special section with a blank front page bearing the headline “His Story Should Be Here.”
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