What might appear as entirely irrelevant..

...might actually apply to this middle school girl demographic.
An article in Ad Age, titled "McNuggets are good, but Branded McNuggets are Even Better," states, "A new study, certain to fire up the already heated debate over kids' marketing, finds that kids aged 3 to 5, when presented with identical foods -- one in a McDonald's wrapper and the other without -- overwhelmingly rated the branded one as tasting better."

So why do I think this is applicable? It would seem to me that this idea of identifying "good" with a particular company only gets strengthened when we begin getting into this demographic we are studying (something I'll look into further for more hard facts). But from the sites I've seen out there, girls associate the popularity of these sites with materialism. Hey, they're middle school girls. It looks like the perfect reason for pairing some sort of site with an already popular "sponsor"-it's an easy attraction to get them to the site.
Just a thought...

Secondly, a very disturbing article published from Brandeis University, titled, "Countering hypersexualized marketing aimed at young girls." How it begins struck me, "Push-up bras. Thong underwear. Eyeliner and mascara. Skirts up to here and shirts down to there. Bare bellies and low riders. Sexually explicit rap lyrics and racy adult television shows." When this article was published in 2005, Desperate Houswives was the most popular television program among 9 to 12 year olds. I see this as our purpose in this project: how do we create the shift from this to news, or at least educating them about news in a "blind" way?
This also struck me,

''We've really lost what used to be called middle school years," says Steiner-Adair. ''It's almost like kids go from elementary school to teenagers. There's no pause."
Where there used to be separate fashions and departments for adolescent girls, 12-year-olds are now being sold the same clothing as 18-year-olds, she says. ''It's turning girls into sexualized objects at an earlier age. Who does it serve? It serves the patriarchal culture and the consumer-driven market. As a culture, we're selling sex to girls at a younger and younger age."

And finally this,

''The girls 8 to 12 years old are growing up so much faster," she says. ''They're incredibly sophisticated, incredibly savvy, incredibly brand-conscious. I think a 10-year-old is a lot more like a 14-year-old now than she used to be, and I think a 14-year-old is more like an 18-year-old than she used to be. I think it's a hard time to be a young girl. . . . They may not be quite ready for the things being thrown at them."