The New York Times has promoted veteran reporter and editor Jennifer Preston to the position of “social media editor.” The announcement was made – wait for it – via Twitter (a formal release was issued afterward).

Preston is charged with ensuring “some consistency about what we consider good uses of [social media] and bad uses of it,” according to Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman. Preston is not a regular social media user…yet, he added. “But I don’t think that’s a terrible handicap here in real ways. Nobody’s an expert.”

The need for a social media honcho at The Times may have been spurred by a mid-May faux pas when details from an internal meeting about Web strategy were broadcast on several reporters’ Twitter feeds.

By the end of Preston’s first day on Twitter, she’d already amassed more than 2,400 followers. Her first tweet: “how should @nytimes be using Twitter?”

Preston previously oversaw The Times’ regional weeklies.