Election news from October 14: Barack Obama advertising on Burnout, registration in barber shops, Joe Biden's happy, newspaper endorsements

• First of all, Ben Smith has an entry entitled "Frontiers of advertising, cont'd" with the above image from Burnout, an online Xbox game. Yet another example of the innovative areas in which the campaign is getting out the vote. Don't forget that the average age of people who play video games is around 34 now, so it's not wasted on people of non-voting age. Edit: here's another post on the same subject with another image from a different game.
  

• BBC reports on North Carolina, where one barber shop makes sure to give people voter registration forms after a haircut and a shave if they haven't registered yet:

A visit to the No Grease Barber's Shop on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, gives a sense of what they mean.

The owners, Damian and Jermaine Johnson, with the Obama campaign's encouragement, have been registering voters for the past year at their three shops.

After every haircut and shave, customers are asked if they are registered to vote. If not, they are handed the registration forms.

Damian estimates he has signed up a thousand new voters. Most of them, he says, will be for Mr Obama.

• Newspaper endorsements: Editor & Publisher is again the site to visit for info on the total number of endorsements, and the latest report gives Barack Obama 17 endorsements for Sunday to McCain's 2. Here's the total so far:
  

So far, the Obama-Biden ticket leads with 28 editorial endorsements, with the McCain-Palin lagging far behind with 11. It's too early to project, but in 2004, John Kerry barely edged George W. Bush in endorsements, by about 220 to 205.

In another important measure: Obama has so far won the backing from five papers that endorsed the GOP candidate in 2004, while McCain has earned no flip-flops.

Taking a look at the newspapers’ combined daily circulations, though, McCain has lost his early edge, and now trails badly with 1,349,721 readers to Obama’s 2,758,429 daily circulation.

• Telegraph.co.uk reports on Biden's campaigning in places where Barack Obama alone wouldn't be quite as effective. I referenced an article a few weeks back about how Biden was expected to be a candidate with a slow start and becoming stronger and stronger as time goes on (the opposite of Sarah Palin, who started out strong and fizzled a la Stockwell Day), and that's becoming more and more obvious as time goes on.