It is fantastic news that Alan Johnston has been released. But what can be done with the considerable momentum of the campaign to free him?
Alan Johnson himself said on the Today programme that there are journalists at risk all around the world, picking out Iraq, Colombia and the Philippines, and said he'd be only too happy to help the International Federation of Journalists or Reporters Without Borders campaigns for other journalists in similar situations. The IFJ said today that 29 journalists have been kidnapped around the world this year, and that all these cases must now be given top priority.
Speaking to me this morning, IFJ president Jim Boumelha said that though the BBC's campaign was faultless and relentless, the local journalists on the ground had really mobilised local people in support of Alan.
"The BBC campaign was faultless. They have the resources to reach the the entire world and on the anniversary days they would make sure staff did something, so it attracted a lot of attention. But inside Palestine, a bigger role was played by the local journalists. The message they put out was that 'Alan is one of us', so when the kidnappers tried to put together a platform and demands they had no support."
Previous IFJ campaigns have tended to focus on impunity over the number of journalists killed each year, said Boumelha, and kidnapped or imprisoned journalists have not been a priority.
"Alan has become a symbol of journalists that have been kidnapped and those that have disappeared without trace, so now is the time to think about campaigns and we will target specific countries."
Johnston will need time to rest and to see his family, but Boumelha said the IFJ will be talking to him "at the earliest opportunity".
David Brain, president and chief executive of Edelman and sixtysecondview blogger, was just one who asked today what we could do with the considerable commitment and energy of the campaign.
Writing on the blog of Richard Sambrook, the BBC director of global news, he said: "What do we do with our little Alan Johnson widgets adorning so many blogs - just take them down or are their other journalists in a similar predicament that we could focus on? It seems a shame to lose the commitment people made if there are others. Perhaps the BBC should start a wider campaign like Elle Seymour has been doing for missing children in the wake of the Madeline McCann kidnapping."
Inevitably, incidents of kidnapping among journalists are far higher in Iraq than elsewhere. There have been 88 recent reported kidnaps in Iraq; 30 of those have ended in murder and six are still in detention. The fate of the rest is unknown.
They include two journalists from Samaria TV, Marwan Ghazal and Reem Zaeed, who disappeared while covering a meeting of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Baghdad, Filaih Wuday Mijthab, managing editor of the daily Iraqi newspaper Al-Sabah, and Radio Free Iraq reporter Khamail Khalaf, whose body was later found in Baghdad suburb Jamia.
