Ladies, keep the Manolo Blahniks in the closet; gents, don’t worry about squeezing into those True Religion jeans. The next time you want to make an entrance at your watering hole of choice, the only accessory you’ll need is a newspaper.

Or so goes the logic over at the Newspaper Association of America, whose new advertising campaign bears the tagline “Smart is the new sexy.” Whether or not this means that dumb was the old sexy, the campaign shows that the newspaper industry is indeed in desperation times.

The group is hoping to drum up readership with ads trumpeting the virtues of staying informed — meaning if you can rattle off the key demographics of Uzbekistan or expound on the present-day relevance of Keynesian economic theory you’re likely to come off as that much more attractive to potential mates. (The actual ads set the bar a bit lower: “Be able to find Iran on a map,” one ad suggests. “Know what the city council is up to behind closed doors. Find out how to make an icebox peanut butter pie from scratch.”)

The campaign comes at a time of plummeting readership, declining ad revenue and increasing consolidation in the newspaper industry. Though these same forces are at work in other developed nations, the situation is much graver in the U.S., where newspapers are far more dependent on ad revenue.

According to the Pew Research Center’s 2011 State of the News Media Report, the U.S. newspaper industry is unique in its continued downward spiral:

“After two dreadful years,” the report notes, “most sectors of the [media] industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. … Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year — an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost—meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30 percent smaller than in 2000.”

The rise of Craigslist (and its corresponding hit to the ad industry), the move to all things digital and contemporary American reading habits are often fingered as culprits in the newspaper industry’s decline. The New York Times’ David Carr pinpointed another culprit: a Wall Street management style.

 Carr recently bid a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out-style farewell to former Gannett CEO Craig A. Dubow, who left his post after six years with $37.1 million in retirement, health and disability benefits. The reward for a job well done? Not exactly. During Dubow’s tenure, the number of employees in this 82-newspaper chain plunged from 52,000 to 32,000 as the company cut costs and compromised at every turn. Carr quotes former Gannett employee Peter Lewis, who railed against the company on his blog, Words and Ideas:

“How did Mr. Dubow and Gannett serve the consumer? They laid off journalists. They cut the pay of those who remained, while demanding that they work longer hours. They closed news bureaus. They slashed newsroom budgets. As revenue fell, and stock prices tanked, and product quality deteriorated, they rewarded themselves with huge pay raises and bonuses.”

And Gannett is not unique. Carr notes that the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, among other holdings, has cut 4,000 jobs since billionaire real-estate investor Sam Zell took the company private in 2007. The company has piled up $13 billion in debt and filed for bankruptcy in December 2008. As part of the deal that will allow the company to exit bankruptcy, Tribune is paying out between $26.4 million to $32.4 million in bonuses to top brass.

As Carr notes, it’s not just on Wall Street that the rich get richer while the remaining 99 percent struggle. Our consolidated newspaper industry plays the game quite well. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs—who the Onion memorialized as the “last American who knew what the … he was doing” —paid himself an annual $1 salary. (Admittedly, his stock shares earned Jobs millions more than that.)

Within this context the “Smart is the new sexy” campaign feels like a Band-Aid. In fact, it feels like a Band-Aid that won’t stick.  According to the NAA’s website, the campaign ads will run digitally and in print for six weeks in more than 1,000 newspapers and are estimated to reach 70 percent of U.S. adults.

In other words, the campaign is preaching to the choir — the folks who already read newspapers.

Photo via (cc) SmithGreg