Papers are trimming their staffs, restaurants are closing and even the glossiest of glossies are being forced to make cuts. These economic challenges were supposed to be limited to the tactile, human world. That other place—that place called "online" that got print into this mess in the first place—was supposed to be immune.

So it’s with a not small amount of economic anxiety that I report that Eater Chicago has been pushed off, seemingly indefinitely. Eater was in some ways a measure of how far Chicago’s restaurant scene has come in the past few years, because if Eater was going to come here then you knew we had enough restaurant drama to sustain their ten posts a day. But the economic situation is trumping the culinary one. "2008 has been a frustrating year for us in Chicago, no question," Curbed/Eater editorial director Ben Leventhal wrote in an email. "Hopefully we’ll have a better story to tell in 2009."

Ari Bendersky, the editor-elect of Eater Chicago who has been practice-blogging on a password-protected site for the past five weeks, seemed less certain that the site would appear even then. "Whether I’m on board really depends on if and when they decide to launch," Bendersky, who now is looking for other work, wrote. "I’ve been really excited about launching Eater and I know a lot of people in the city were excited about it. If we were a restaurant, I guess we could’ve been put on Deathwatch."

Photo via Eater