AAN director of sales and marketing Roxanne Cooper and her assistant, Tiffany Kildale, resigned last week after accepting new positions with different employers. Cooper will be leaving AAN in February to take over as associate publisher of the
Philadelphia City Paper, and Kildale departs next month to assume the position of meeting coordinator at the Chemical Producers & Distributors Association in Washington, D.C.
Cooper joined AAN in March 2003. Her primary responsibility has been managing the association's AAN CAN classified network, although she played a number of other important roles at AAN, which benefited from her previous experience working in ad sales at member papers as well as Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper for the U.S. military.
"Roxanne has done a fabulous job at AAN," executive director Richard Karpel said in an email to the board of directors announcing her departure. "She helped bring AAN CAN back when it was faltering; her passion for trends and developments in sales and marketing and digital media helped all of us keep current; and her dedication to the financial success of alternative newsweeklies was unmatched."
Kildale came on board a little over a year after Cooper, in July 2004. In addition to the day-to-day administration of AAN CAN, Kildale also handled a number of other administrative duties at AAN. Ultimately it was the assistance she provided in the association's meeting planning department that led to her new job. Karpel told the board that Kildale has been a "wonderful employee" who is "smart and incredibly pleasant to work with, and she always made the AAN CAN trains run on time."
According to Karpel, AAN will restructure the positions in light of the simultaneous resignations. The association's immediate priority will be to hire a part-time administrative assistant to work 20 hours per week handling the day-to-day logistics of AAN CAN -- inputting the ads, distributing them on a weekly basis to AAN paper, auditing member papers to verify ad placement, and so forth. AAN hopes to have someone on board in that position by the new year.
AAN will also begin an immediate search for an
advertising sales manager whose primary responsibility will be managing the AAN CAN network. The new sales manager will also be responsible for identifying new revenue sources for the association, and may serve as liaison to the Adervtising Committee, helping the committee develop retail and classified programming for the convention and conferences.
After the dust clears, the association will add one additional employee, to handle marketing, public relations and web development, or some combination thereof. The search for that position will not begin until the sales manager is hired and the organization's needs come into clearer focus.
