The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) is promoting a new campaign to present how newspapers are becoming multimedia outlets.

Well, the idea is excellent.

The choice of this illustration is wrong though.

Multimedia journalism is not funny, it’s something more serious than this.

This kind of misrepresentation is the last thing that we need to enlist our newsrooms in this new media landscape.

Good news:

More than 59 million people (37.3 percent of all active Internet users) visited newspaper Web sites on average during the second quarter of 2007, a record number that represents a 7.7 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to custom analysis provided by Nielsen/NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America.

In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated nearly 2.7 billion page views per month throughout the quarter, compared to slightly more than 2.5 billion during the same period last year.

The second quarter figures are the highest for any quarter since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004.