Emma Tucker's Deadline

The new Wall Street Journal editor, recently imported from London by Rupert Murdoch, knew little about America, New York, or her staff. And then Evan Gershkovich got arrested in Russia.

- By Shawn McCreesh

Emma Tucker got her first inkling that something bad might be happening on the afternoon of March 29.

Two months into her job as editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, she was having a business-as-usual meeting with Liz Harris, her managing editor. Harris, an Australian, had followed Tucker to New York from the also–owned–by–Rupert Murdoch Sunday Times of London. Harris mentioned, almost as an aside, that a 31-year-old foreign correspondent named Evan Gershkovich had missed his daily check-in. The last time he’d been heard from, he had just arrived at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, Russia, to meet a source. Not to worry; these things sometimes happen.

Tucker, 56, paused and thought for a moment. She had been introduced to hundreds of people since Murdoch announced in December that he was giving her the Journal job. Before she arrived in New York, she’d passed through the Journal’s London bureau and met a procession of foreign correspondents stationed there. Ah yes, Evan. He had left Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine, but within a few months, he’d returned to do reporting, filing vivid, on-the-ground stories about the human, economic, and social costs of the war. She remembered.