The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is so self-evidently dumb, an Umbridge-worthy example of the bureaucratic mentality run amok, that you have to wonder if newspapers – especially the once-robust, medium-sized daily paper – have indeed reached some kind of suicidal turning point.

Others have said it, and I’ll repeat it: Lileks is a unique talent. He is a clever and funny writer on the cheesiness and delights of pop culture and a keen observer of life in the American suburbs (mainly, his own). He also writes on politics and has been a prominent warblogger (though on those fronts I rarely agree with him). So he stands out in a medium whose adherence to convention and tradition are slowly strangling it, pushing it out of the boundaries of general interest and relevancy.

Lileks could be a great resource for the Star Tribune or any newspaper trying to homestead various niches on the web (as he notes himself). He is already “branded” and read widely (are Strib editors even aware of this?) and smart about the plastic ways of the new medium, from design to photos to video. His website is an interesting, ever-changing repository of words, images, impressions.

(In the 1990s, I worked in the Newhouse News Service bureau along with Lileks, then – and now – an NNS columnist. I can’t say we were close; at one point, I wrote a rather cutting parody of a Lileks column, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for it. But I wouldn’t have bothered if there wasn’t something distinctive and rich there. How many of us can even write recognizably enough to be parodied?)

So why constrain Lileks’s talent within the stilted conventions of reporting and newswriting, rather than harnessing it? The dynamics of such decision-making are invariably opaque to anybody not in the room. It sounds like somebody said, “we have too many columnists,” and went from there.

Perhaps they did have too many columnists – five is an awful lot. Being a columnist doesn’t imply academy-style tenure anymore, nor was it a good thing when it did. But if you’re making decisions about your paper, and the starting and ending point is a box on a checklist that says “reduce number of columnists,” rather than “how can we use the resources we have to do new things, because our survival depends on it,” then you clearly don’t have a clue that your survival is, indeed, at stake.