About Atin Ito

Atin Ito

Overview

Atin Ito, published online as Atin Ito News and in print under the masthead Atin Ito Philippine NewsFeature, is a Filipino-Canadian monthly newspaper based in Mississauga, Ontario, and distributed to Filipino-Canadians in Canada. Its name is Tagalog, meaning roughly "this is ours," and it is among the oldest Filipino community newspapers in Canada: it was founded in 1976, an anniversary formally recognised in the Senate of Canada in 2016, when the paper marked forty years of publication. The December 2023 issue, the most recent issue located in the research for this profile, describes the paper in its own masthead as published every month for distribution to Filipino-Canadians in Canada, under the publishing name AI NewsMediaOne, with its editorial and advertising address in Mississauga.

Atin Ito belongs to the first generation of Filipino-Canadian community media. It was created in the mid-1970s, when Toronto's Filipino community was growing rapidly and when events in the Philippines under martial law gave expatriate readers an urgent reason to follow news from home in their own language and from their own perspective. Its longevity is its defining fact: a one-page newsletter started by friends in 1976 became, in the words of the 2016 Senate tribute, a monthly broadsheet newspaper, and the paper was still publishing monthly issues, in print and in digital flipbook form, in late 2023. Its official website is atinitonews.com.

History

The founding of Atin Ito is credited in two complementary accounts, both of which place it in 1976 and both of which should be reported, because they name different central figures in what appears to have been a collective founding. In the Senate of Canada on 20 October 2016, Senator Tobias C. Enverga Jr. paid tribute to Eduardo Lee, known as Eddie Lee, describing him as a notable senior and a beacon of inspiration and leadership for many Filipino Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. According to that tribute, Lee arrived in Canada in 1972 to join his wife Maria Rita, and four years later started a one-page newsletter, Atin Ito Newspaper, with some of his friends. Since then, the senator said, Atin Ito had undergone several transformations to reach its form at that time of a monthly 52-page broadsheet newspaper; it was Canada's oldest Filipino community paper, in his description, and it had celebrated its fortieth anniversary the previous month, in September 2016.

The second account concerns Ruben Cusipag (1938–2013), a journalist and social activist described as a pioneer of Filipino-Canadian journalism who established several community newspapers in Ontario in the 1970s. Cusipag was born in Paco, Manila, studied at Araullo High School, where he was editor-in-chief of the school publication, and graduated from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English. He worked as a reporter for several newspapers in the Philippines, notably The Evening News of the Manila Broadcasting Company, and was, according to his biography, one of the first media workers arrested and imprisoned when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. He left for Canada with his family in 1974 because of that political suppression, worked as an editor with community newspapers including the Newfoundland Signal and Toronto's Philippine Tribune, and served as a foreign correspondent for Bulletin Today, now the Manila Bulletin. In 1976, that biography records, he co-founded the newspaper Atin Ito and became its first editor. In 1978 he independently launched another newspaper, Balita, becoming its founding publisher and editor and producing articles critical of the Marcos dictatorship.

Read together, the two accounts describe a founding circle rather than a lone proprietor: Lee starting the newsletter with friends, and Cusipag, the most experienced journalist among that generation, co-founding the paper and editing its first issues. Eddie Lee then became the paper's enduring publisher: a January 2010 Filipino-Canadian media monitor published in Toronto described him as publisher of the oldest newspaper in Toronto, Atin Ito, in a discussion of Filipino-Canadian media access to news stories — evidence that, three decades after the founding, Lee was still the public face of the paper. Cusipag, for his part, also co-founded the Kababayan Community Centre and published a book, Portrait of Filipino Canadians in Ontario (1960–1990), in October 1993, partly funded by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture. He died on 9 July 2013 at Markham Stouffville Hospital.

By its fortieth anniversary in 2016, according to the Senate tribute, Atin Ito was a monthly 52-page broadsheet, printed in 9,000 copies per issue, with an estimated pass-on readership of nearly 100,000 — figures given by the senator in 2016 and reported here as his, not as current audited circulation. The tribute also credited Lee with building an up-to-date online presence for the publication covering breaking news from the Philippines, Canada and the world. The paper continued publishing through the following years: Positively Filipino, the online magazine for Filipinos in the diaspora, records that it republished a piece, "On Newsmen's Row," that Atin Ito News had published in three segments on 16 November 2021, 1 December 2021 and 1 January 2022, and digital editions of Atin Ito on the FlipHTML5 platform include monthly issues dated May 2022, September 2023 and December 2023. The December 2023 masthead names Eduardo I. Lee as Publisher Emeritus and Leonardo H. Santos as Publisher, a generational transition in the paper's leadership that had taken place by that date.

Content and Coverage

Atin Ito's coverage, as shown in its recent issues, is built around Philippine news for a Canadian readership, supplemented by Filipino-Canadian community content and opinion. The December 2023 issue carried Philippine national news stories sourced from The Manila Times, including a report by Ma Reina Tolentino on a lawmaker's warning that the Manila Electric Company, Meralco, might lose its franchise over the submission of annual financial and operation reports, and a report on Philippine government borrowings rising in October 2023, including Bureau of the Treasury data on domestic and overseas loans and the national debt. Material of that kind — Philippine congressional proceedings, public finance and utilities — is the core news diet of a diaspora paper whose readers follow the country they left as closely as the country they live in.

Alongside wire and partner-paper news, the paper carries its own voices. The masthead of the December 2023 issue lists contributing writers including Adam Aspilla, Louie Divinagracia, Michelle Chermaine Ramos, Riza Khamal, Alfred Kwong, Ayah Barghout and Rodel Ramos. Named columns appear in the issues: Louie A. Divinagracia's Adhikain column, which in September 2023 discussed rising rice prices in the Philippines, food inflation, rice import policy and a presidential executive order imposing price ceilings on rice, inviting readers' comments by email to the paper; and Rodel J. Ramos's Thinking Aloud column, which in May 2022 reflected on resistance to change and on Philippine politics around that month's Philippine elections, including the counting of overseas votes observed in Toronto. Opinion and commentary have been part of the paper's character since the Cusipag period, when its circle produced journalism critical of the Marcos dictatorship, and the May 2022 issue's election coverage shows the paper still engaging directly, and argumentatively, with Philippine politics.

Features and literary content form a third strand. The three-part "On Newsmen's Row" piece that Positively Filipino republished in 2022 was a work of narrative non-fiction about Manila journalists, and its republication by a United States-based diaspora magazine shows Atin Ito content travelling beyond its own print run. Advertising in the December 2023 issue is itself a form of community information: it is dominated by Filipino-Canadian professional and consumer services, including a Markham law firm offering Philippine legal documents in Tagalog or English, such as deeds of sale, special powers of attorney and affidavits, alongside real estate, corporate, estate, immigration and family law services, and dental practices in Mississauga and Milton marketing to Filipino patients. A reader can learn from those pages which lawyers can prepare a Philippine special power of attorney in Ontario and which dentists serve the community in Mississauga — the practical connective tissue of a community newspaper.

Audience and Reach

Atin Ito is published, in its own words, for distribution to Filipino-Canadians in Canada, and its historic base is the Filipino community of the Greater Toronto Area, including Mississauga, where its office is now located. The only circulation figures in the sources used for this profile are those given in the Senate in 2016: 9,000 copies per issue and an estimated pass-on readership of nearly 100,000, the latter reflecting the community-newspaper pattern in which a single printed copy is read by several people in a household, workplace or community venue. Those figures are a decade old, are attributed here to the 2016 tribute, and are not presented as the paper's current circulation, for which no audited figure was found.

What can be said about the paper's present reach rests on its distribution model and its digital editions. A monthly print paper placed in the businesses and institutions of a concentrated diaspora community reaches readers who may not seek out Filipino news online, including older readers who arrived in the same migration waves as the founders. The flipbook editions on FlipHTML5 extend the same paginated newspaper to readers anywhere, preserving the print layout, columns and advertising in a form that can be read on a phone or computer. The republication of Atin Ito material by Positively Filipino in 2022, with explicit credit to the paper's segment dates, indicates that its content also reaches the wider North American Filipino diaspora through partner publications. The paper's subject matter defines its audience as much as its distribution: a reader who needs Philippine congressional news, rice-price policy analysis and an Ontario lawyer who can draft Tagalog documents is a reader living a binational life, and Atin Ito has been edited for that reader since 1976.

Digital Presence

Atin Ito's official website is atinitonews.com, the address printed in the paper's own masthead, which also gives its contact email domain at the same address. The Senate tribute in 2016 already credited Eduardo Lee with ensuring a high-quality, up-to-date online presence for the publication covering breaking news from the Philippines, Canada and the world, describing it as evidence of his forward-thinking approach. In practice, the paper's most visible digital form in the research for this profile is its series of full-issue flipbooks published by the AtinitoNews account on FlipHTML5, which reproduce complete monthly issues — including the May 2022, September 2023 and December 2023 editions — page by page. That format preserves the newspaper as an artefact rather than breaking it into individual web articles, which suits a monthly whose readers expect an issue, not a feed. Readers looking for the current issue and the paper's current contact arrangements should start at atinitonews.com, since print-era listings for Toronto-area Filipino papers in older directories may carry superseded addresses for a paper founded in Toronto that now works from Mississauga.

Ownership and Organisation

Atin Ito is published by AI NewsMediaOne, the publishing name shown in the December 2023 masthead. The same masthead sets out the paper's organisation at that date: Eduardo I. Lee as Publisher Emeritus; Leonardo H. Santos as Publisher; Marita Ramirez-Lee responsible for advertising; Mark Oabel for operations; and Marissa Buyco-Corpus for business, with a listed group of contributing writers. The structure is that of a small community publishing operation, in which the publisher and a handful of staff covering advertising, operations and business work with freelance and community contributors — a model unchanged in essence from the paper's newsletter beginnings, when its founders combined journalism with community organising, as Cusipag's co-founding of the Kababayan Community Centre alongside his newspapers illustrates. Lee's move to Publisher Emeritus by December 2023 marks the formal handover of the publisher's role to Santos while keeping the founder's name at the head of the masthead.

Contact and Availability

Atin Ito is a monthly newspaper for Filipino-Canadians, published from Mississauga, Ontario. The December 2023 issue directs advertising enquiries and editorial material to Suite 210, 2000 Argentina Road, Plaza 2, c/o AJMC Group, Mississauga, Ontario L5N 1V8, gives the telephone number 416-417-7187 for advertising, and prints the website www.atinitonews.com. Readers should confirm current contact details through that official website, because community newspapers change offices and the address above is taken from the December 2023 masthead, the most recent issue examined in the research for this profile. Print copies are distributed within the Filipino-Canadian community, and digital flipbook editions of monthly issues have been posted by the paper's AtinitoNews account, allowing readers outside the Greater Toronto Area to read complete issues online.