Sign up today for the Run For Austin Virtual 5K race on Saturday, November 18, 2023. New this year, the race which has been held annually since 2021, aims to bring attention to journalist Austin Tice, as well as Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who are currently being held in Syria and Russia respectively.

Austin is a Marine combat veteran, a seventh-generation Texan from Houston, a graduate of Georgetown University, and an award-winning journalist who has been unjustly detained in Syria since 2012. After seeing reports of the refugee crisis unfolding in Syria, Austin picked up his camera and headed straight to the front lines as a freelance reporter. He delivered important dispatches to The Washington Post and McClatchy before he was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus on August 14, 2012. After more than eleven years, he has endured the longest detention of any U.S. journalist to date.

In March of this year, Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal was arrested in Russia while on a reporting trip and accused of espionage, making him the first American journalist detained in Russia on such charges since the Cold War. Evan is the American son of Soviet-born Jewish exiles and grew up in New Jersey. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, in 2014. Before joining the Journal in January 2022 to cover Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, Gershkovich was a reporter for Agence France-Presse, the Moscow Times, and was also a news assistant at the New York Times.

Join hundreds of journalists and press freedom supporters on Saturday, November 18 by lacing up for this virtual 5K.  If you are local to the Washington, D.C. or Houston areas stay tuned for meet-ups and a very special Pancake Breakfast in our nation's capital.  We call on Syria and Russia to release these journalists immediately, and we invite you to join us in our efforts to bring them home!