Mediacom Communications said Tuesday it has promoted Barry Paden to senior vice president of programming, the first in a series of key promotions at the mid-sized cable operator.

In his new position, Paden, who had been group vice president of programming, will continue to negotiate programming and retransmission consent agreements on behalf of Mediacom. He will also focus on securing media rights for strategic multiplatform initiatives, including video-on-demand and out-of-home authenticated TV Everywhere content. Paden began his career in the cable industry in 1988 with Multivision Cable TV, and joined Mediacom as director of programming in 1999.

In addition, Mediacom said it promoted vice president of internal audit Louis Gentile to group vice president of internal audit, where he will take on a principal role in providing internal audit compliance and other field audit activities for the company. He began his career in the cable industry in 1989 as an internal auditor with Multivision Cable TV, and joined Mediacom in 1998 as business manager of the Gulf Coast Region.

Mediacom also upped Mary Green from senior director of internal audit to vice president of internal audit. In this role, she will oversee the Sarbanes Oxley related audits conducted by Mediacom as well as the operational audits the company performs at its 100+ business office locations throughout the country. She entered the cable industry in 1989 as a manager trainee with Tele-Communications, Inc., and joined Mediacom in 2005 as a senior manager of internal audit.

Joseph Michulski has been promoted from senior director of finance to vice president of finance and will continue to play a major role in administering the company’s 401(k) plan, overseeing medical benefit expenditures and purchasing corporate insurance among other responsibilities. Michulski began his career in the cable industry in 2000 as a financial analyst with Mediacom.

Debra Zullo has been promoted from senior director of IT to vice president of IT where she will lead the LINUX system engineering and Oracle database administrative teams. In this role, she will work with both internal and external groups on new system and data requirements as well as design, implementation, testing, validation and automation. Zullo began her career in the communications industry in 1994 with AT&T, and joined Mediacom in 2005 as senior manager of system engineering.

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Italia Commisso Weinand has seen a lot in 40 years in the programming negotiation business. Through stints at Comcast, Tele-Communications Inc., Times-Mirror Cable and Time Warner Cable, and since 1996 at midsized cable operator Mediacom Communications, she has hammered out deals that have set the benchmark for both large and small operators.

But as programming deals have evolved from simple carriage agreements nailed down over the course of a dinner conversation to the complicated digital, mobile and on-demand rights tomes that can take months and sometimes years to work out, she has stuck to one basic tenet: Do the right thing. That goes for both sides of the negotiating table, Commisso Weinand said in an interview with Multichannel News. As deals get more complicated and programmers rely more and more on carriage fees to make up for advertising and viewership declines, that tenet becomes more important than ever.

For Commisso Weinand, doing the right thing doesn’t mean she wants programmers to acquiesce to her every demand. She has said for years that Mediacom is more than willing to pay fair prices for content. But she also insists that programmers realize she has a business to run and that programming talks should consider other constituencies besides the two sides at the negotiating table.

“It’s not about us; it truly is about the customer,” Commisso Weinand said, adding that larger companies sometimes lose that perspective, especially when dealing with operators the size of Mediacom.

“I’m the buyer, not the seller,” Commisso Weinand said. “When my staff gets mistreated because there is a big ownership group, and they’re so much more important and they’re so much bigger, that’s when it all breaks down. But we’re still around. Most of those people don’t have jobs today. The arrogance persists.”

Commisso Weinand is fiercely protective of her negotiating team, which with just four people — group vice president of programming Barry Paden, vice president of programming Joseph Appio, vice president of advanced consumer services John Woods and consultant Glenn Goldsmith — has hammered out countless deals and stuck together for 18 years.

That kind of longevity doesn’t necessarily mean they always agree, but it does mean that they can let their opinions be known, Commisso Weinand said: “I have smart people. They don’t always agree with me. We have arguments.”

Paden said that, during programming negotiations, the team has “very entertaining conversations, because we have three different points of view, but we get to a good place.”

To which Commisso Weinand added, “a good place for the company and for the customers.”