WSJ’s Gershkovich on how reporting in Russia works

Evan Gershkovich

The Associated Press profiled Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia.

The AP writes, “Two years later, excited by what he’d learned at the Times, he wanted to get reporting experience and found a slot in 2017 at the Moscow Times, an English-language news site in the Russian capital.

“‘When you start reporting in Russia, you often hear that it will be very hard to get people to talk,’ he said in the Bowdoin interview. ‘And while that may be true of Russian officialdom -– though not all of it -– I have found that if you go looking for the right people, many of them want to tell their stories.

“‘Of course, some will want their comments to be from an unnamed source, which means, as a reporter, you have to make sure you speak to them over encrypted channels and protect their identities. But they’re out there,’ he said.

“Gershkovich later moved to the French news agency Agence France-Presse and then to the Journal.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.