Long seen by many – especially by those in the industry, not surprisingly – as a cornerstone of democracy, newspapers have faced some tough sledding of late. For the dailies in particular, falling circulation and advertising revenues have led to cuts and closures. Certainly not good for those working in the media, but worse still for accountability.

National Newspaper Week gets underway October 2, celebrating the role of newspapers in the communities they serve.

Besieged by new technologies, fragmentation in the market and what seems to be an increasingly detached citizenry, newspapers do have much to worry about. But the industry has been its own worst enemy in many cases, as concentration of ownership led to homogenization and a decline in quality, often fueled by new corporate masters more concerned with stock prices than with the good journalism, the very thing needed to attract readers.

The changes in the newspaper business haven’t gone unnoticed by the public, with researchers finding a third of readers in some markets stopped turning to a news outlet because it no longer provided them with the news they were accustomed to getting.

Still, some 86 per cent of Canadians read newspapers each week, underscoring the essential service newspapers provide with diverse, local, original content that cannot be found anywhere else.

Ironically, even as we’re flooded with information – from online news sources to Facebook and Twitter and that ilk – there’s a greater need for a source to filter and interpret all of that raw data. That’s precisely what newspapers have been doing for centuries.

And while more people go online to get their news, few people are aware that most of the material provided by news aggregators such as Google or endlessly rehashed by bloggers comes from newspapers, the organizations with trained journalists on the ground, attending meetings and poring through documents.

Moreover, the digital realm is a bastion of fake news, made worse by increasing partisanship that sees people in silos of (mis)information from which they seldom deviate, with the resultant decline in the numbers of informed readers.

While we tend to associate such downward slides with the U.S., Canadians are not immune to fake news.

Facebook was the most commonly cited source of fake news, with 77 per cent of Facebook users saying they had personally seen fake news there, followed by 62 per cent of Twitter users and 74 per cent of social media users in general.

There is some hope Canadians at least are starting to sort things out, becoming more critical of social media postings. When asked which online source is the best for providing accurate and reliable news, two-thirds of us choose one that has its roots as a traditional media outlet.

Study after study has shown trust remains an issue even as we’re inundated with ever-increasing volumes of information.

Clearly, access to the truth is at risk. For the legitimate press, the biggest threat comes from digital sources such as aggregators, which “appropriate” news generated by actual journalists, promulgates fake stories and debate, and draws away revenues despite studies that show such advertisements to be ineffective.

It’s that heavy lifting that separates traditional media from new forms, and why most Canadians still consider mainstream media as the most trustworthy source.

Not surprisingly, those in the industry see the changes as a threat not only to their future but to the democratic function of the media. As we’ve seen in an increasing number of cases – the Trump/Russia investigation among them – the internet leads to a proliferation of lies, disinformation, propaganda and what would actually qualify as fake news.

The proliferation of information via technology is far more chaff than wheat, leading to information overload. Trouble is, most of it is useless, making for an ill-informed citizenry.