The Newspaper Association of America released numbers on Tuesday showing how ever more people are turning to the Internet to get news.

That’s good news in the sense that it presents an ever-more convincing case to advertisers that they should be working with their friendly neighborhood newspapers, ie, giving them lots of money and helping them survive. On the other hand, those online readers used to help those papers a lot more when they bought them in print… But that’s another story.

Here’s the release, which includes some links to the NAA’s latest pitch to advertisers on why newspapers are the right place to buy ad space:

Arlington, Va. - Newspaper Web sites attracted nearly 66.4 million unique visitors on average (40.2 percent of all Internet users) in the second quarter of 2008, a 12.2 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated an average of just over three billion page views per month throughout the quarter, compared with nearly 2.7 billion during the same period last year.

“The Internet has become the news destination of choice for many sophisticated consumers and newspaper companies continue to meet their evolving demands,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “The latest audience figures provide further evidence that newspapers’ digital properties deliver highly-accurate and hyper-local content that consumers can’t find anywhere else.”

As newspapers continue to grow their audiences online, NAA has created a new online destination for advertisers: www.newspapermedia.com. The site, redesigned in flash format, highlights the benefits newspapers’ multi-platform offerings provide advertisers, complete with enhanced details on reader engagement, ad ideas, audience data, production specifications and much more.

“With newspaper sales staffs placing an unprecedented emphasis on digital advertising, newspapermedia.com offers the information they need to demonstrate the effectiveness of the medium’s multi-platform offerings,” said Randy Bennett, NAA’s senior vice president of Business Development. “We have loaded the site with the latest data and research, captivating slides for presentations and a section on advertising ideas that have proven highly effective.”