JAMES LILEKS has gone from writing about stores to running one!

Some (sort of) background here. And, of course, from Lileks himself. But workplace courtesy demands that he pull his punches. Don Surber, not so much: “Hot type thinking in a digital world.”

UPDATE: National Journal’s Danny Glover — who works at a place that actually understands new media — call sthe Star Tribune’s move “boneheaded.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch! “One indicator of bad management is the underuse of assets and the inability to recognize opportunity to use the talent of the employees to their fullest. In this case, management knows what it has in James, and they’re tossing it away anyway. That’s not just bad management; they should keep sharp objects away from these managers and only allow them to use crayons. Please tell me that the men and women who made this decision do not drive to work unsupervised.”

And Dave Barry comments: “This is like the Miami Heat deciding to relieve Dwyane Wade of his basketball-playing obligations so he can keep stats. Sometimes I don’t understand the newspaper business. What’s left of it.”

Glad I don’t own stock.

STILL MORE HERE: “If the Strib had any institutional sense whatsoever, they’d make James the poobah-in-chief of their online division, and turn him loose. They’d have the best online paper in the country in less than a month. What they’re doing now is an idiotic waste of talent. Attention, newspaper publishers with a brain: here’s a guy who can bring in a hundred thousand new pairs of eyeballs in the blink of an, er, eye. You say you’re losing money to the web? Well, he knows more about the online world and how to communicate on it than anybody on your staff.”