Bring Evan Gershkovich home: Paul Beckett's most important assignment
The Wall Street Journal veteran discusses reporting for an “audience of two.” Plus, Parker Molloy talks pioneering adventure writer Virginia Kraft with “The Catch” author Emily Sohn.
Standing with Evan
As of today, it has been 258 days since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia while on a reporting trip to the city of Yekaterinburg. The 32-year-old was charged with espionage, becoming the first American detained for spying in Russia since the Cold War.
Gershkovich, the Journal, and the United States government vehemently deny the allegations, which come amid increased tensions between the U.S. and Russia. On December 5, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said Russia had rejected a “substantial” offer to free Gershkovich, who is being held in the infamous Moscow prison Lefortovo, as well as another U.S. detainee, Paul Whelan.
Last Monday—day 250—Gershkovich’s sister, Danielle, and Journal editor Paul Beckett did a combined 10 news hits on CNN, BBC, NewsNation, and Fox affiliates. The goal, Beckett tells me over the phone later that day, was to “make sure that Evan is not forgotten.” He adds, “Because if he’s forgotten, I don’t think anything will happen.”
Beckett, who hails from Scotland, is a 25-year veteran of the Journal and was the paper’s Washington bureau chief until October. He has moved into a new role, one dedicated exclusively to securing Gershkovich’s release. A large part of the gig is doing reporting, but not for the pages of the Journal.
“It’s reporting for an audience of two: [Journal publishing company] Dow Jones and the Gershkovich family,” he says. That means Beckett has been talking to everyone from former State Department officials to press freedom organizations: “I’m saying, ‘If you were in our shoes, what would you be doing?’ and everybody has good ideas.”
“It’s reporting for an audience of two: Dow Jones and the Gershkovich family.”
The Journal, Beckett says, is not taking part directly in discussions to free Gershkovich. “It’s really a case of creating a landscape on which the U.S. government and the Russian government can figure out a way to bring him home,” he says. “How do we create enough awareness that Evan becomes a household name?”
Beckett says he expects Russia to extend Gershkovich’s pretrial detention until the end of March, so now he’s focusing on how to publicize the #IStandWithEvan movement on March 29, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the reporter’s arrest.
Beckett, who has never met Gershkovich in real life, is an admirer of his colleague’s work. “Obviously he did good reporting on Putin, he did good reporting on [Russian mercenary group] Wagner,” Beckett says. “But the stories that jump out at me are his reporting on the ground in Russia about how ordinary Russians are feeling about the calamitous events that surround them.”
“That just gives you a sense of where Evan sees his calling as a reporter, to be out there and say, ‘What’s the the impact on the people?’ as opposed to ‘Where’s the Kremlin taking this next?’”
At Depth Perception’s request, Beckett selected three of his favorite Journal pieces by Gershkovich:
“Dozens of Russian Draftees Died in a Ukrainian Strike. Putin’s War Machine Rolled On.” (Jan. 16, 2023)
“What struck me about this was the multilayers of reporting. Dozens of Russians killed in a Ukrainian strike would suggest an upper hand for Ukraine. But in reporting in Russia, Evan found that—aside from a few souls—there is so little opposition to the war. The ability to send more conscripts into Ukraine to die without a domestic uprising is one of Putin’s advantages. It’s an advantage I believe we are seeing him exercise today as the war bogs down, despite Ukraine’s extraordinary response and the West’s support.”
“A Russian Soldier’s Inside View of Moscow’s War in Ukraine” (Sept. 5, 2022)
“This story is about an experienced Russian soldier in the war, saying what a calamity it had been from the Russian side. And that was an extraordinary perspective to get—a difficult perspective to get. He was like, ‘This isn’t working’ and was very public about it. He was a brave guy to go on the record like that.”
“In Russia’s Biggest Cities, Ukraine War Fades to Background Noise” (July 1, 2022)
“Meanwhile, back at home, Russia knows there’s a war going on. But life goes on, too, and people were out partying. It’s so hard to imagine what it’s like in Russia, but when you read Evan’s reporting, you get it. Of course, the DJ’s have never been busier. Of course, people are going out to restaurants and jazz clubs. The war is not happening to them in the middle of Moscow.
“That just gives you a sense of where Evan sees his calling as a reporter, to be out there and say, ‘What’s the impact on the people?’ as opposed to ‘Where’s the Kremlin taking this next?’ Of course, he can do that report. He did it very well. But [these personal stories are] what distinguished him.” —Mark Yarm
*The above story has been updated to reflect that March 29, 2024 is the one-year anniversary of the Gershkovich’s arrest, not March 9 as was previously reported. Long Lead regrets the error.
Hunting Journalism History
You've probably never heard of Virginia Kraft, but let’s change that. Last week, Long Lead published “The Catch,” adventure journalist Emily Sohn’s more than 13,000-word dive into the life of the former Sports Illustrated writer and journalism pioneer who died earlier this year at 92.
Long Lead Audience Development Director and Depth Perception editor Heather Muse introduced readers to the profile of this trailblazing sports journalist in the Long Lead updates newsletter, and today, Parker Molloy catches up with Sohn to discuss how a standard “forgotten history” story turned into a meditation on work, life, and the legacy we leave behind.
The story behind the story
Story Bureau’s David Wolman, also an independent journalist, first mentioned Kraft to Sohn, who then set out to understand how the avid outdoorswoman — among Sports Illustrated’s earliest hires in the 1950s — could fade into obscurity relative to her peers after a wild career that included hunting with royalty and dictators across six continents.
“Once I started reading about her, I became intrigued,” says Sohn. “She did a lot of incredible things and was clearly a female adventure-journalism trailblazer who had become almost completely forgotten for that role.” Sohn wasn’t ready for the rabbit holes she’d go down while chasing the story. “It was clear that there was also so much more to her than [her journalism], including an entirely second life as a wildly successful thoroughbred horse breeder.”
Excerpt: From “The Catch”
In 1954, Kraft joined a pheasant hunt with other members of the SI staff at a preserve in upstate New York. Also on the trip was Red Smith, a New York Herald Tribune columnist and frequent SI contributor whose later work for The New York Times was syndicated in nearly 300 papers nationwide and earned him a Pulitzer. Smith noticed Kraft, who showed up the night before the other staffers, went out early the next morning, and shot a buck with a brand-new shotgun. Smith’s column about the hunt, which appeared in December that year, described Kraft as a “pretty gun moll” who “smiled with cool composure” but confessed that the sport was new to her. “It was the first deer I ever saw,” said Kraft, who told Siena graduates that the hunt is how she landed the SI job. A few months later she wrote her first story.
On May 2, 1955, less than a year after starting with the magazine, Kraft’s debut bylined article appeared, an ambitious feature about joining General Francisco Franco’s hunting party. The over-the-top expedition was a massacre: 92 hunters and 350 servants downed 34 boars and 82 bucks, including a 20-point stag. Even though Kraft never fired a shot, raising her gun only once, it was a dramatic opener. The story set the template for her career at SI.
The reporting process
Sohn began by reading any articles she could find written about Kraft. A major challenge was a general lack of access to many articles from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, which haven’t been digitized. In her later years, Kraft pivoted from writing about hunting to breeding horses, an exploit that was better covered by the press.
Newspapers.com became a useful source, Sohn says. “Editor Glenn Stout was a huge help in navigating that site to turn up articles that were written about her during her journalism heyday.” Natalie Voss, a journalist who had written a profile about Kraft for a horse magazine, referred Sohn to a library in Kentucky that sent her another load of documents, and data from Ancestry.com helped with details about Kraft’s family history.
This was helpful, Sohn says, as Kraft’s surviving family members do not have much of an online presence, and the colleagues she overlapped with at Sports Illustrated who are still alive are long past retirement. Though Sohn was able to connect with a few helpful sources for the piece, this only got her to the “outer layer of the onion” of this story.
“I knew from the get-go that I wanted to retrace Kraft’s reporting steps so that I could compare her time with mine, and I spent a lot of time reading through her archives on Sports Illustrated and trying to find the right story to pursue,” says Sohn. “For a while, I was convinced I needed to go to Alaska and fly out to the sea ice with a scientist to tranquilize a polar bear. After many inquiries, I had to accept that I was not going to get myself onto a helicopter.” After that, Sohn started looking into a trip to the Mato Grosso in Brazil to search for jaguars, but finally settled on a fishing tournament in Louisiana. “I set out to learn whatever I could about the IWFA [International Women’s Fishing Association], a women’s fishing organization that was new when Kraft wrote about them and still exists today,” Sohn says.
“For a while, I was convinced I needed to go to Alaska and fly out to the sea ice with a scientist to tranquilize a polar bear. After many inquiries, I had to accept that I was not going to get myself onto a helicopter.”
From there, Sohn outlined Kraft’s story, fleshing out the individual sections as her continuing research allowed. Some research would provide detail and nuance to a point she was already making, but other times it “completely shook up [her] understanding of people and events.”
Understanding Kraft’s fade into obscurity
It’s a challenge to profile a historical figure whose remaining public record was mostly her work. Kraft’s nephew said she didn’t identify as a feminist, but simply an individualist, which complicates her legacy. As Sohn notes in the story, in 1972 Kraft told a reporter that “her contribution to women’s lib… was that she ‘wanted to cover hunting and fishing and the editors had no objections.’”
Is this the main reason we haven’t heard much of Virginia Kraft before now? Possibly, but Sohn notes that “history is filled with forgotten people who did important things, particularly women, and there are a lot of reasons why it happens.”
“For Kraft specifically, her significance lies in the accomplishments she achieved as a woman in the 1950s,” adds Sohn. “At a time when women who wanted to work in magazines were far more likely to either write for fashion publications or do secretarial and behind-the-scenes work, she was traveling around the world, writing major narrative feature stories for the country’s premier sports publication.” While researching the piece, Sohn discovered local newspapers would cover Kraft when she traveled to their area on a reporting trip. The journalist became the news.
Kraft’s humble personality may have contributed to her muted legacy, as well, Sohn says.
“I think part of the reason she slipped from public memory was the era,” she continues. “There was no social media, which made it harder to become a personality or build a brand. Even if there had been a Twitter or LinkedIn, my understanding of her is that self-promotion was not her style. She was focused on doing the work, not talking about it. She likely would not have wanted to come across as bragging.”
“History is filled with forgotten people who did important things, particularly women, and there are a lot of reasons why it happens.”
The decrease in hunting coverage in mainstream sports publications also explains Kraft’s relative obscurity. A trailblazing figure is less likely to be remembered if that trail has gone dark.
“Since she didn’t lead any public movements or even join in on a formal fight for equality, she didn’t benefit from everlasting attention as a leader or icon,” says Sohn, adding that neither did SI legend George Plimpton, but the standards are different.
“There’s a lot of complexity in her life story. After more than 25 years in journalism, she married into extreme wealth and immersed herself in the horse business, which itself earned her quite a bit of notoriety,” Sohn says. “As time passed, her earlier life faded into obscurity. There was no mechanism for memorializing her journalism influence, and because she hadn’t claimed that role, it slipped away.”
Lessons for other journalists, especially for members of underrepresented groups
Times have changed, but there are still lessons to be learned from Kraft and her decades-long run at Sports Illustrated, Sohn says.
“We live in a different era from the one Kraft had to navigate, and the context clearly matters,” she says. “Non-male and non-white journalists today have more opportunities than they did in her time, though there is clearly still a long way to go. I think one big takeaway is to recognize how important it is to boost representation and collaboration, to make more room for new writers and diverse stories.”
Sohn says that when she was researching the 1970 sex discrimination lawsuit against Time Inc., a conflict which Kraft notably avoided, she was “struck by the realization that Kraft had made her way with no female mentors to turn to.” That lack of guidance may have shaped her approach. “Essentially, she had to act like a man to succeed in a man’s world,” says Sohn. “One takeaway for me is the importance of mentorship and collaboration.”
Confidence was key to Kraft’s success, Sohn notes. “She knew what she wanted, and she did what she had to do to reach her goals. Even today, it remains harder for women to stand up for themselves, and they are more likely to get judged or criticized for ‘leaning in.’ Kraft didn’t seem to be bothered by this kind of self-doubt, at least not outwardly.”
Read “The Catch.”
That’s a wrap on Depth Perception for 2023. We’ll be back in January with more deep dives into the world of longform media.
In the meantime, have a safe and happy holiday season, and may you have the luxury of time to get lost in a great story.
See you in 2024!