From our Whistling Past the Graveyard desk:

The Newspaper Association of America ran a full-page ad in Friday’s New York Times featuring a Rainbow Coalition of 18-34 year olds reading newspapers under the headline, “Numbers Like These Always Look Good On Paper.”

Body copy:

In the past two years, the newspaper business has faced unprecedented challenges, but make no mistake: newspaper media – print and digital – remains [sic] strong and will emerge from the current environment an even stronger multi-platform force.

To reinforce that wishful thinking, the ad marshals a small army of statistics such as, “104 Million: Number of adults who read a print newspaper every day, more than 115 million on Sunday.”

Excellent! Mazel tov!

But other stats are more problematic, like this one:

61%

18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds who read a newspaper in an average week. 65% of everyone in those age groups read a newspaper or visited a newspaper website that week.

Raise your hand if you think the overall ratio of web to print among that crowd is under 90-10.

Then there’s this intriguing stat:

TONS

Number of creative options for advertisers choosing to utilize the newspaper. From belly bands, polybags, post-it notes, scented ads, taste-it ads, glow-in-the-dark and temporary tattoos, as well as event and database marketing, behavioral targeting, e-mail blasts, e-newsletters and more.

Usually I’m worried about the “and more,” but that ad copy is scarifying enough in what it says outright.

Event and database marketing? (See the Washington Post’s recent event debacle.)

Behavioral targeting? No thanks, I’m trying to quit.

The newspaper association ad bravely ends thusly:

This is not a portrait of a dying industry. It’s illustrative of transformation. Newspapers are reinventing themselves to focus on serving distinct audiences with a variety of products, and delivering those audiences effectively to advertisers across media channels.

Yes, well, if belly bands are the future of newspapers, I guess I’ll just have to swallow it.