Ruby Russell, reporter, Berlin; covered Turkey and Syria:

Covering the Syrian uprising from Berlin was not ideal but with the near-impossibility of getting into the country (even if budgets had allowed), I became immersed in the Syrian uprising from a frustratingly removed vantage point. As refugees flooded across the border into Turkey I spent my days glued to the phone, Facebook and email, being fed information from colleagues on the border and forming link in the chain between citizen journalists in the midst of the protests and newspaper readers in America. Everything else was neglected, from better-paid work to feeding myself and keeping the apartment clean.

It was almost impossible to reach people in Syria directly. Gently asking Syrian activists in London or Beirut if there was any way at all they might put me in touch with their contacts on the ground, I had just how dangerous it would be for anyone in Syria to talk to the press explained to me with varying degrees of patience. 

But there was one exception, when I was able to call Hervin Ose, an activist in Qamishli who had just lost a close friend, leading Kurdish activist Meshel al-Temo (whom we had interviewed a few weeks before his death). It was a bad line. I struggled to follow what she was telling me: a previous attempt on his life, how she witnessed the security forces firing on mourners at his funeral, his last words to her hours before he died, how his death would mark a turning point in the revolution.

I was deeply affected by Ose's words and at the same time helplessly far away, not just geographically but in terms of life experience. I could hear shouts in the background and pictured her rocked by a great crowd of people living through something immense at the other end of that muffled line.

Hanging up the call I had to focus on the story: Was this really going to ignite a fury in Syria's Kurds that would spell the beginning of the end for Assad? Or was that what a grieving woman has to believe because the alternative is that the brutal end of her friend's life was only what his killers intended it to be: a man who might have made a difference erased from Syria's future.

Most reports from Syria, particularly in the first few months of the uprising, came through networks of activists and ultimately from ordinary Syrian people driven to speak out. You are acutely aware that your best sources are far from neutral. But you also know that mostly, these are people who need the truth to come out and to that end, are risking their lives, more than their own lives actually, and certainly more than meals and clean dishes.

-- Jabeen Bhatti, Ruby Russell, Sumi Somaskanda, Sarah Lynch, Jennifer Steil, Mike Elkin, Joshua Maricich, Aida Alami, Akram Khalifa and Kristen Gillespie.