"Before I even found a place to park my car, I saw a man shooting up," writes Dominick Reuter, a photographer based in Princeton, New Jersey. "Dressed in dark pants with his sweatshirt halfway off to expose his arm, he stood on the litter-strewn sidewalk, swaying as he fed the needle into his arm."

"I had just pulled into the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia to follow up on a story I had heard on the radio. Stretched along a half-mile of commercial rail tracks, there was said to be the largest open-air drug market in the eastern United States."

"My last journey to Syria will remain etched in my memory, more like a pilgrimage than a reporting assignment," writes Rana Moussaoui, deputy bureau chief in Beirut who has spent years covering Syria's war from a distance.