Jubilation Inside The Wall Street Journal After Gershkovich is Freed

At 11:16 a.m. on Thursday, Emma Tucker, the top editor of The Wall Street Journal, sent an email to the newsroom: “A few moments ago, Evan walked free from a Russian plane. He will shortly be on a flight back to the U.S.”

Whoops of joy and cheers followed. The Journal’s newsroom had been waiting 491 days for Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old foreign correspondent for the paper, to be released from imprisonment in Russia.

“I cannot even begin to describe the immense happiness and relief that this news brings and I know all of you will feel the same,” Ms. Tucker wrote in the email. “This is a day of great joy for Evan and his family, and a historic day for The Wall Street Journal.”

Staff members quickly gathered in the center of the newsroom with champagne, some in tears, to hear Ms. Tucker give a toast to Mr. Gershkovich’s freedom and the hard work it had taken to get there. Much of the praise went to Paul Beckett, the former Washington bureau chief who has worked on getting Mr. Gershkovich’s released full time for the past nine months.

Similar celebrations played out in The Journal’s London bureau.

“He’s off the plane!” Gráinne McCarthy, a top international editor in London, shouted after watching a livestream video of Mr. Gershkovich walking off the plane that took him to Turkey, several Journal reporters recalled outside their office on Thursday. They cheered. They hugged. They popped Prosecco, giddy and sobbing with relief.

“It feels like the end of a nightmare,” said Eliot Brown, who covers finance and is a close friend of Mr. Gershkovich.

On an all-company video call at noon, Almar Latour, the chief executive of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, told employees that Mr. Gershkovich was on a plane to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He would then fly to San Antonio, where Ms. Tucker, Mr. Latour and several other executives would meet him.

“There is so much to be said and we will share a fuller story when we can, and best of all Evan will share his story because that’s what really matters,” Mr. Latour said, according to a recording of the call. “Right now, I’m going to be brief and I just want to express my gratitude, my intense gratitude for everyone on this call.”

Jason Conti, Dow Jones’s general counsel, recounted the “thousands and thousands of hours” his team put in to find a way to get Mr. Gershkovich out of prison, and applauded Mr. Gershkovich and his family as “remarkable.”

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“Truly remarkable, the way he handled himself over these last 491 days,” Mr. Conti said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And then Mr. Conti reached down and took off the #IStandWithEvan pin he had been wearing on his lapel for 16 months.

“We don’t need the buttons, but I need the tissues,” Mr. Conti said.