The Newspaper Association of America takes the wraps off a new campaign on Monday to convince advertisers that papers and their Web sites are the best place to persuade audiences to buy things that businesses want to sell. The reason? They’re cool enough for hip, edgy and irreverent young people.

The association noted that the ads would portray newspapers as “contemporary and aggressive,” not something whose target audience spends Saturday nights at a VFW dancehall.

The first of these ads will sport the tag “Newspaper: The Multi-Medium,” to emphasize that the news is about the Web, mobile phones and all sorts of other delivery methods, not just paper.

I brought this up with Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He noted that this could be the cue for a makeover of the typical U.S. newspaper executive:

“I think the challenge for the newspaper industry is that it’s trying to persuade the advertising community that it’s not a dying industry, but it’s an emerging one making the transition to a new platform,” he said. “To be an emerging industry, that suggests that you have some of the hallmarks of Silicon Valley. You don’t wear a tie anymore and you wear blue jeans and turtlenecks, and maybe a two-day beard.”

In other words, dress like a reporter.

You can read the Reuters story here.