– Dave Miller, the deputy managing editor of the Killeen Daily Herald, the hometown paper for Fort Hood, providing a voice of reason during what had to be the most chaotic news event in the paper’s history. CJR has the full interview with Miller, and it’s worth a read if only to remind that not every media outlet in the country is solely interested in extreme headlines.

The witness, who asked not to be identified because it could damage his military career, has been interviewed by the Defense Criminal Investigative Division. He said Major Hasan wheeled on Sergeant Munley as she rounded the corner of a building and shot her, putting her on the ground. Then Major Hasan turned his back on her and started putting another magazine into his semiautomatic pistol. It was at that moment that Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, a veteran police officer, rounded another corner of the building, found Major Hasan fumbling with his weapon and shot him.

Without question there was a great deal of chaos surrounding the unprecedented events that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday afternoon. It was also reported for many hours that shooter Nadil Hasan was dead, when in fact he was at the hospital in stable condition. Also the result of the chaos? It’s entirely possible. However the Army does not have a great track record with the media when it comes to accuracy.

The case of Pat Tillman has recently returned to the headlines — Tillman was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2004, though the Army (and the White House) initially tried to turn death into a propoganda win by telling people he had died under enemy attack.

The current confusion also brings to mind Jessica Lynch: “When the Army initially reported Private Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance in which she emptied her weapon and was wounded in battle. It was later learned she had been badly hurt in a vehicle accident during an ambush and was being well cared for by the Iraqis.”

Obviously, the full story, including Nadil Hasan’s testimony, has yet to come to light, and currently the Army is refusing to provide further details and yesterday on Oprah neither Sgt. Todd nor Sgt. Munley offered up any (possibly because they are not allowed yet to discuss it in public). However, under the harsh media spotlight currently trained on Fort Hood — which will only increase should this be determined an act of terrorism — one suspects the Army won’t be able to keep the details of the events to themselves for much longer.

After the “hey look, Twitter did a new thing!” factor wore off, there was a backlash against Twitter lists. Early on, Jeff Jarvis astutely pointed out that aside from adding a “listed” stat for accounts, the lists themselves weren’t being used all that much:

As Mediaite pointed out, they take a long time to make correctly, and even then the current infrastructure favors already-big players like corporations and celebrities. The laundry list of problems goes on: they’re easy to game with blogroll-like listing exchanges; there are so many redundant lists as to cancel out the value of any individual one.

The response to the tragic Forth Hood shootings highlights a potentially fruitful approach. Rather than creating broad, evergreen, mostly useless lists like “/blogs/,” a topical list like “/ft-hood/” can emerge in a time of need to filter out the drek that inevitable emerges in a sure-to-be-flooded hashtag like #forthood.

Writing on the same topic, the Columbia Journalism Review notes that many of the best and most authoritative lists covering the tragedy emerged from established media outlets riffing off of other established media outlets. “Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins,” CJR writes. Lists “represent a new—or, more precisely, a newly facilitated—way for news organizations to collaborate … So The New York Times gets to provide its users real-time information from Waco’s NewsChannel 25—and NewsChannel 25, in turn, gets to have its reporting amplified to the readers of the paper of record. Win and win.”

One problem: what if everyone is getting it wrong? Glenn Greenwald compellingly condemns big media outlets and Twitter alike for putting out tons of inaccurate details about the Fort Hood shooting (were there three gunmen? was the shooter a convert to Islam? did the shooter die? did combat fatigue have something to do with it?) and influencing early news consumers’ views of the situation as a result.

A feed of information can only be as good as its components, but upping the quality of those components can only be good news for its consumers and, by extension, for its curators.

Related: two especially good lists:

NY Times’ curated list

CNN Breaking News’ curated list

Civilian police Sgt. Kimberly Munley and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire Thursday afternoon, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said Friday. Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, Cone said. “It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” Cone said. Munley was only a few feet from crazed Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan when she opened fire.

And this is a screengrab Munley’s Twitter account, though she doesn’t appear to use it with great frequency. Her Twitter bio reads:

I live a good life….a hard one, but I go to sleep peacefully @ night knowing that I may have made a difference in someone’s life.