Three decades out of the newspaper business, it's still hard sometimes not to second guess decisions on coverage. This weekend's coverage of the Wisconsin Democratic Party's convention is a case in point. This weekend's non-coverage would be a more apt description. The event drew 700-plus delegates, but virtually no media attention, even in Milwaukee, where it was held. The state's largest newspaper, once the Wisconsin paper of record, almost ignored it entirely.

The Associated Press did file a complete story Friday night, carried in abbreviated form in most outlets which used it, headlined, "Gov. hints at re-election bid as state Dems rail on Iraq war" The most complete version, ironically, seems to be in the Winona Daily News, on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi. But the papers and TV stations which used it mostly cut it to about five paragraphs.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, whose newsroom is about five blocks from the convention site, carried nothing in Saturday's paper and very little on Sunday.

Here is almost the complete JS print coverage of the two-day event:

After a two-day victory lap to celebrate the party's successes last fall, state Democrats left Milwaukee and their annual convention Saturday on the road to 2008.

That was the lede on a Sunday story that never mentioned the convention again until the end of the story, when it finally tacked on what had happened on Friday night.

The paper would argue, no doubt, that it didn't print anything because there was nothing newsworthy to report. The main evidence to back that up would be that there were no presidential candidates in attendance, as reporter Greg Borowski duly reported -- but on the paper's political blog, not in the newspaper itself.

Borowski covered the convention and dutifully filed a series of short stories, each a few paragraphs long, which were posted online. But none of them made the paper, and no one combined them to produce the kind of story the AP did.

Some of that's news judgment, of course, and there's room for disagreement on what's news and what isn't.

But the AP, and many media outlets, thought it worth mentioning, for example, that Gov. Jim Doyle, in his Friday speech, hinted for the first time that he may run for a third term. >p> [UPDATE: The Wisconsin State Journal did a complete story on the subject on Monday.]

If Tommy Thompson had said that, it probably would have been the top story on page one, with a couple of sidebars for analysis and reaction.

But this was Doyle, the governor the JS editors seemingly love to hate.

The Dems must share some of the blame for not making the convention more exciting. Certainly a presidential candidate or two would have livened things up. In some years past, the whole slate of candidates would show up to court Wisconsin Dems. But the changed nature of the campaign, and the new calendar, have made Wisconsin a backwater again. No one can spare a day for us right now.

And the Dems clearly would have wanted one of the Big Three -- Clinton, Obama, or Edwards -- not a Dennis Kucinich or even a Chris Dodd.

Funny, though, how the JS covered the state Republican convention in May, sending reporter Stacy Forster to Lake Geneva for the weekend and running stories both days.

Of course, they had two alleged presidential candidates there -- Sam Brownback (who?) and Tommy Thompson.

Saturday's 350-word story was on Brownback's speech:

Lake Geneva — Republicans have lost sight of their core principles and should emphasize limited government, faith and family, and a commitment to winning the war on terror, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), said Friday...

And Sunday's 800-word story -- yet another in an endless series of virtually identical stories on Thompson's candidacy -- offered no news, either:

Lake Geneva — Tommy Thompson knows some question whether he can win the presidency, just as they said when he first ran for state Assembly and governor. "I know a couple of you don’t think I can win," Thompson told about 500 members of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, who were gathered at Lake Geneva for their annual convention. "Some of you believe that maybe I shouldn’t run." But things, Tommy said, were going great, just great.

Political junkies, of course, could rely this weekend on WisPolitics' convention blog for coverage. Between that and the JS blog there was a decent amount of online information and coverage. But there was next to none in that "liberal" mainstream media that most voters rely on for information.

Television news has long ago decided that covering politics isn't sexy. If newspapers follow suit, it will force voters to rely more and more on television advertising for their information. The editorial writers say they hate that idea, but the news editors don't seem to mind.