Kairos

The only magazines my 4 roomates and I typically have around the house are Sports Illusstrated and Maxim, so for this assignment I chose to use the more interesting, and less risque, SI articles. Within the SI issue I found a great article on steroid use in baseball, more specfically the case of Alex Rodriguez. Interestingly enough, I found an article on the same subject in one of the more recent Maxim issues, what a coincedence right?

Baseball and its athletes have certainly been under the microscope lately when it comes to steroid scandals. With reports coming out left and right about different abusers and "cheaters," one would think that simply coming clean before-hand would still hold an athlete in high respect to their fans, however, most players are still choosing to keep things hush-hush. Because they choose to let things play out in this manner, there is alot of kairos dependent on the media to be able to cover such allegations that come out against players just like Alex Rodriguez. Both of the articles that I read had come out within a 2 week period after A-Rod admitted to his 3-year use of banned substances. I thought this was interesting lack of kairos because both magazines are monthly and they were forced to wait for their next publication in order to print any opinions their writers had or any insight they may have had either. They basically missed out on the most opportune moment to print the articles, which was basically the next morning. Other stories came immediately from everywhere whether it was ESPN or Yahoo Sports or even newspapers around the U.S. and even in the Dominican Republic.

The only way these articles could accurately draw succesfully on kairos was to include new information that other articles had lacked due their immediate printing, therefore the two articles I read ended up benefiting from waiting a little while because they were then able to add much more insight and inside information and interviews and the like to really back up their story and to create a much more interesting article on this specific subject in general.