Douglas Rushkoff is right — traditional media are caught between the stream and the reservoir

paid content reporting:
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has a new book out entitled “Present Shock,” which is about modern society’s obsession with what is happening now, and how that obsession is exacerbated by tools and technology such as social media. In a recent interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, he talked about what that means for media outlets such as the New York Times, and how some of these entities are stuck between catering to what he calls “the flow” of the real-time news stream and their traditional status as gatekeepers or storehouses of knowledge....
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In his book, Rushkoff talks about the difference between “flowing information” — such as Twitter or Facebook or other stream-based sources — and “stored information,” of the kind that newspapers and books specialize in, where it is fixed in time and remains more or less unchanged. In a nutshell, the author says that newspapers are caught between trying to serve these two very different needs. And it’s not just those companies themselves, but news consumers as well:

“You just can’t use the newspaper to keep up in society any longer. And you can’t use live blogging to make sense of anything.”

Rushkoff isn’t the only one to notice this: for me, the tension between those two modes of information delivery — the real-time stream and the fixed-in-time reservoir — was best described by Robin Sloan, author and former Twitter staffer, in an essay about what he called “stock” and “flow.” Those terms come from the world of economics, where people are used to talking about stored value (such as cash and other monetary instruments, or physical resources) and the real-time fluctuation in the value of those things: i.e., the trading of currency or the sale of goods...http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/04/douglas-rushkoff-wants-you-to-quit-tweetdeck-and-read-a-book/