Five developments at the intersection of social media, technology and journalism for the week ending Nov. 9.

Covering the Fort Hood shootings

Amid tragedy, social media again became an outlet for early reports from the scene. In the chaos after last week's shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, Tearah Moore, a soldier who recently returned from Iraq, was tweeting from inside the post. Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, argued that Moore's tweets were another example of how social media is turning us all into "inhuman egotists." Carr argued that because Moore's tweets could be seen as insensitive and turned out to be largely inaccurate, that's proof that "citizen journalism" is a failure. Carr pointed out that Moore's tweets were picked up quickly by bloggers and the mainstream media (at her urging) because she said you can't believe what the mainstream media was reporting. In the end, Carr argues that social media and technology are intersecting not to give us better journalism but to take away our humanity, as the media-makers fight to be first with a report, no matter the consequences. It's a thought-provoking piece, and once you get past some of the moronic comments, you can find a pretty good discussion about whether the words "citizen" and "journalists" can and should go together. A thoughtful response to Carr's post was made by Suw Charman-Anderson in her blog Strange Attractor.

Media outlets turn to Twitter

Within minutes of the news of the shootings, journalists at some of the biggest outlets in the country looked to Central Texas to find Twitter accounts to aggregate into lists. Mashable took a look at the efforts of the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times and others. The lists brought a lot of attention on smaller outlets, such as the Killeen Daily Herald, which was tweeting news from the scene. A day after the shootings, Poynter zeroed in on what the New York Times did, and on the Austin American-Statesman, which had set up a dedicated Twitter account for Fort Hood news on the afternoon of the shootings. (Disclosure, I created @FTHoodshootings for the Statesman and was tweeting from that account through the weekend).

What is newspaper Web 'premium' content?

Steve Outing believes it would be smart for newspapers to keep most of their sites open but charge for the best premium, new content. What content would that be? Outing asked people to respond in the comments section of his blog with their ideas. Check out the comments to see some really interesting ideas, from charging for crosswords to college football or financial news. The comments section is still open, and I'm sure Outing would like to hear what you think would constitute premium content.

Google CEO: "We want to help. We really do."

Despite the perceived battles between print publishers and the biggest aggregator of all, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about what his company can do to help print publications during a chat with journalists at Google's Cambridge, Mass., offices. Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachary M. Seward reports that Schmidt danced around Google's recent decision to start labeling some blogs as a "blog" in search results, talked about how the company can help with micropayments and more. Schmidt clearly sounds like a cheerleader for the print industry, saying that when it comes to helping print, "We have a responsibility. We have not yet figured out how to exercise that responsibility … We’re looking for new ideas." A juicy tidbit at the end: Schmidt said invite-only Google Wave is "getting ready for a much broader distribution…very soon,” which he clarified to mean within weeks. Let's hope Google speeds up the pokey servers on which Wave appears to currently reside.

"The plural of ‘barista’ is ‘journalism majors.’”

The headline above is just one of the more than 300 gems sent out as tweets by @FakeAPStylebook, which is a hilarious satire of the actual Associated Press Stylebook. For most of its short existence, it was a mystery who was behind the witty posts, but Wired's Callie Kimball unmasked the authors, who, of course, are now planning a book.