The latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report found something that should make every newsroom sit up a little straighter.

Globally, more people now get their news from social media and video platforms than from television or dedicated news websites.

Hand in hand with this is an even more alarming statistic: Trust in legacy media is at an all-time low. Here at home, the warning light is even brighter.

Trust in mainstream news in the Philippines fell to 28 percent, down 10 points, the steepest decline among all 48 markets surveyed.

That should worry everyone. Not just editors. Not just reporters. Not just the bare handful of people who still enjoy the smell of newsprint with their morning coffee.

Because this is not simply a media industry problem, it is, as multiple experts have suggested, a democracy problem.

We live in a time when news increasingly reaches people through feeds they did not choose, pushed by algorithms they do not understand, amplified by influencers they cannot fully trust and weaponized by political operators serving specific agendas. Outrage travels faster than context. Falsehoods arrive dressed as memes. Propaganda comes with a ring light and a colorful caption.

In that environment, legacy media cannot simply demand respect because it has been around longer. Longevity is not immunity. A masthead is not a magic shield. If newspapers, broadcasters and news sites want to remain relevant, they have to keep earning it. Every day. Story by story, correction by correction.

This does not mean legacy media has become obsolete — far from it. But it increasingly has to work on establishing its continued relevance.

At its best, professional journalism performs a function no algorithm, anonymous page, or partisan vlogger can replace. It checks. It verifies. It names sources. It separates reporting from opinion, or at least tries its best to do so. It submits itself to standards.

It can be criticized, sued, corrected and held accountable. That may sound old-fashioned in a digital world, but old-fashioned is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it just means someone is still doing the work properly.

Democracy needs that work. Before citizens can argue about what should be done, they need some shared basis for what actually happened. Without this common baseline of fact, public debate becomes noise.

One side brings documents, the other brings vibes. One side cites records, the other screams bias. Eventually, everyone retreats to whichever corner of the internet tells them they were right all along.

This is why institutions like DAILY TRIBUNE, now marking its 26th anniversary, still matter. Not because any publication is perfect. None can claim that.

But a serious publication can choose to be a civic space rather than just another combat zone. It can publish a broad range of views without surrendering to fakery. It can allow disagreement without abandoning facts. It can give readers something increasingly rare in this polarized moment: A common page on which different arguments can still be made honestly.

The challenge for legacy media is not to compete with social media by being louder, cheaper and more reckless. That race has no prize worth winning. The challenge is to be better, clearer, fairer, braver, more transparent, more useful.

So yes, happy anniversary to the TRIBUNE. But more than that, may it be a reminder. The medium is changing. The habits are changing. The platforms are changing. But the need for credible journalism is not.

If anything, we need it now more than ever.