For several months, a counter on top of a Wall Street Journal website tracked the days, hours and minutes that Evan Gershkovich had spent in Russian custody. It reached 491 days, one hour and 20 minutes — until it was replaced Thursday with a long-waited headline: “WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich is free.” Gershkovich’s release in a prison swap that involved the U.S., Russia, Germany and four other countries marked the culmination of a relentless, 16-month campaign launched by the Journal alongside his family and friends that encompassed hashtags, billboards, celebrity advocates, letter-writing campaigns and closed-door meetings with high-level government officials. It began the moment newsroom leaders realized their reporter had gone missing while on assignment in the Ural Mountains, reports the Washington Post.
A message posted on Russian messaging service Telegram reported that security agents had removed a person from a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, near where Gershkovich was expected to travel. After the reporter missed two check-ins with the company’s security team, editor in chief Emma Tucker called then-Washington bureau chief Paul Beckett. He reached out to high-level Biden administration officials, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was soon on the phone promising support. That “was the beginning of a truly nightmare scenario,” Almar Latour, Journal publisher and CEO of parent company Dow Jones recounted. The charges — which Gershkovich’s bosses said were entirely unfounded and false — carried serious consequences. Beckett pushed his contacts to get the White House to publicly disavow the spying accusation. Tucker began speaking to the media. The days turned into weeks and months. Dow Jones and the Journal launched a multifaceted strategy — some of it playing out via social media, some of it behind closed doors with foreign officials and dignitaries — to get the reporter released. And the company never relented, taking every opportunity to inject Gershkovich’s case into the public forum. The Journal made a point of reporting on every development in Gershkovich’s case as it wound through Russian bureaucracy and devoted a webpage on the latest news.
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