By Don Knox, STATE BILL COLORADO
Now we know why The Denver Post’s PoliticsWest.com website was a virtual ghost town over the past two months.
Denver’s largest newspaper has walked away from its politically themed website, originally undertaken by former Business Editor Stephen Keating. After Keating left the paper last year, PoliticsWest.com became less immediate and less creative, and its already thin traffic trailed so badly that a blog site, ColoradoPols.com, crowed that it had more Web visitors.
So now The Post gives its readers The Spot, which, unlike PoliticsWest, isn’t a standalone site — so there’ll be no more woeful traffic comparisons with Pols, or any other site (State Bill Colorado among them).
What is this new site? In the words of the site’s editors …

The aim is to create a single site for people from all over the world to keep up with public affairs in Colorado and nationally.

Think of it as a high-tech version of the Justice League of America. Superman was great on his own. And so was Batman and Wonder Woman. But when they joined forces, they were unbeatable. We know you’ll continue to visit those partisan, Legion of Doom websites, but we hope you’ll come back and visit us when you’re looking for a little truth, justice and the American way.

Ugh.
The first 48 hours of The Spot haven’t exactly produced groundbreaking political journalism — more like sappy snippets of legislative insider-isms proferred by Lynn Bartels (she filed eight such dispatches before 2 p.m. today.) One of those was a reminder that the annual legislative feed-fest, the Colorado Restaurant Association reception, “points out how valueable (sic) the industry is to Colorado’s economy.”
She adds: “Not to sound like Penny Parker here, but the crab cakes are to die for.”
Perhaps The Post’s editors will become more creative in the coming weeks, taking advantage of video, audio and analytical tools that are being embraced by emerging news orgs. Until then, readers will have to decide whether this is The Spot for them.