As you enter the newsroom, there’s a hallway papered with front pages from The Wall Street Journal — one page for every day that their reporter, Evan Gershkovich, has spent behind bars in Russia.

“He was doing journalism in Russia in a time when it was the most closed off to the world than at any point since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Evan’s friend Anton Troianovski, who is Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York Times. 

NJ Spotlight News spoke with the imprisoned correspondent’s friends and colleagues — from Manhattan to Berlin — as they marked the one-year anniversary of his unprovoked arrest by Russian agents.

For Gershkovich — the New Jersey-born son of Russian emigres — working as a foreign correspondent for a major newspaper was a dream job. Colleagues admire his professionalism, his excellence as a reporter, his determination to write stories about what’s happening to the people in Vladimir Putin’s increasingly autocratic state.

“He loves Russia, the people. He wanted to be there and tell those stories, and he was incredible at it,” said Wall Street Journal reporter Caitlin Ostroff. 

“It could have been any of us. It happened to be Evan. And I feel a great burden and duty to him for that reason — that he has spent a year in Russian prison for doing the work we all do,” said his friend Joshua Yaffa, who wrote from Moscow for the New Yorker. 

They are fiercely determined to stand by their friend and work to bring him home.