ACM TORS: Information Director vs. Outreach Editor

The old “Information Director” Joeran Beel is now the new “Outreach Editor” Joeran Beel. ACM TORS thanks ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, for accepting the proposal to change the title. “Outreach Editor” seems a little more appropriate for the actual task: writing catchy announcements, trying to collect as many clicks and views as scientifically defensible, and resisting the temptation to be too far off to attract even more clicks. After all, ACM TORS is still an academic journal with an academic audience.

The change follows ACM TORS’ recent post on LinkedIn

I have a title problem. Officially, I’m the ***Information Director*** of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems. In reality, I log into LinkedIn and post: “New paper just dropped.” That feels… slightly misaligned.

So I’m crowdsourcing a better title — something between “Director” and “person who presses the ‘post’ button.” Current candidates include:

– Outreach Editor
– Head of Research Dissemination
– Chief Paper Announcer
– Senior Button Pusher
– Academic Hype Officer
– Director of “Please Read Our Papers”
– Visibility Engineer
– Content Amplification Specialist
– Chief Tweeting Officer

I’m aiming for something accurate, but not embarrassingly inflated — and ideally not too close to “academic social media grunt.”

Are other journals having the same problem? Or found a solution? Min Zhang, Giulio Jacucci, Shlomo Berkovsky, Ryen W. White, Cristina Garbacea, Jian Pei, Jiliang Tang, Judith Masthoff?

Suggestions welcome.

Yours, Joeran Beel, “Information Director” of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS)