10/21/2003
AP names Kentucky and New Jersey bureau chiefs and a New York executive

NEW YORK -- The Associated Press has appointed Arizona Chief of Bureau Steve Elliott to the new position of deputy director of newspaper content services, and named Hank Ackerman and Dan Day as bureau chiefs in Kentucky and New Jersey, respectively.

The announcements were made Tuesday by Tom Brettingen, senior vice president for newspaper and new media markets.

Both Ackerman and Day have been general executives in what was formerly the Newspaper Membership department, now part of Newspaper and New Media Markets.

In Louisville, Ackerman will succeed David Wilkison, who recently was named director of state news/West, a new position. Day transfers to Trenton, N.J., succeeding Sally Carpenter Hale, previously appointed bureau chief for Pennsylvania.

Elliott has been chief of bureau in Phoenix since 1998. He was born in Willoughby, Ohio, and was raised in Phoenix. He joined the AP in 1987 in Honolulu, serving as newsman and broadcast editor, and moved to the national editing desk in New York in 1991. He became news editor in Milwaukee in 1993 and was named assistant chief of bureau in San Francisco in 1995. He arrived in Phoenix as news editor in 1997.

Elliott, who has a bachelor's degree in religious studies and journalism from the University of Arizona, won an AP Oliver S. Gramling Scholarship Award in 2003, helping him earn his master's degree in business administration from Arizona State University this year.

He received a special citation from the Arizona Newspapers Association and the local Society of Professional Journalists for directing a statewide audit of access to public records in 2002.

Ackerman has been a general executive at New York headquarters since 1993. In 1997, he formed part of the team that created the AP Multimedia Services department. He became director of marketing for Multimedia Services, while continuing his work with newspaper Internet operations.

Born in New York City, Ackerman was raised in Louisville, where his father worked for The Courier-Journal. He received a degree in history from Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. He worked for The New York Times as an editorial assistant before serving with the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal Zone as a Signal Corps lieutenant.

Ackerman earned a master of arts degree in Latin American history from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and joined the AP in New York in 1972 as an editor on the World and Latin American desks.

In 1973, Ackerman was appointed news editor in the Buenos Aires bureau for Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. He was appointed chief of bureau in Lima, Peru, for the Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay area in 1975. In 1978, he became chief of bureau in Caracas, covering Venezuela, Colombia, Surinam, the Guyanas and the southern Caribbean islands. In 1980, Ackerman returned to the United States as Cleveland correspondent.

He became chief of bureau in New Orleans in 1983, in Detroit in 1987 and in Atlanta in 1991. Two years later, he became a general executive in Newspaper Membership.

Day has been a general executive since 1999 in Newspaper Membership, where he was involved in developing and marketing services to newspapers and their Web sites. He oversaw AP's Newsfinder service for weekly newspapers and was AP's liaison with The Canadian Press news agency.

Day joined the AP as a newsman in Milwaukee in 1981 and became news editor in Omaha, Neb., two years later. He was named correspondent in charge of Nebraska operations in 1985 and bureau chief there in 1988. He became bureau chief in Seattle in 1989 and in 1993 in San Francisco, where he oversaw AP operations in northern California and northern Nevada.

He served as president of the California First Amendment Coalition.

A native of Cleveland, Day earned a bachelor's degree in the classics from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., and a master's in journalism from Marquette University in Milwaukee. Before joining the AP, he was a reporter at The Daily Times in Ottawa, Ill.

contact: Jack Stokes
212-621-1720