Since a competing lower-priced newspaper, The Bugle, was started five

I've been doing a lot of reading about assumptions and trying to memories a template. It all goes in and sticks until I sit down to do a timed essay.

Any pointers on this timed attempt would be greatly appreciated.

The question: ."Since a competing lower-priced newspaper, The Bugle, was started five years ago, The Mercury's circulation has declined by 10,000 readers. The best way to get more people to read The Mercury is to reduce its price below that of The Bugle, at least until circulation increases to former levels. The increased circulation of The Mercury will attract more businesses to buy advertising
space in the paper."

My essay:
The passage argues that The Mercury is losing readers due to the emergence of a cheaper newspaper named, The Bulge, five years ago and that if The Mercury undercut the price of The Bulge, it’s readership would recover. This argument is based on a series of flawed assumptions such as; overall demand for newspapers remaining constant over the past five years, both newspapers have an identical target audience, The Bulge’s readership number negatively correlating with the decline of The Mercury’s and overconfidence in the quality of journalism being published in The Mercury.

Firstly, the argument assumes that times don’t change and demand for newspapers has remained constant over the previous five years. There is no evidence showing that people still want to read newspapers, therefore, it is unwise to assume that the number of readers and revenue will increase if the price of The Mercury drops.

The second assumption, incorrectly, used in this argument is one of cause and effect. The author assumes that the emergence of The Bulge has caused the reduction in readership. However nothing shows that The Bulge has seen success, it is entirely possible that The Bulge is struggling with retention to the same degree as The Mercury. Therefore, it is a fragile argument that reducing the price of the newspaper will bring in considerably more revenue from readers and advertisers.

Another way in which this argument is unsubstantiated, is the reliance on the false assumption that two different things are alike. In particular, that the readership of The Mercury and The Bulge are identical. If The Bulge provides an entirely different style of content, it is incredibly unlikely that The Mercury will be able to poach those readers and therefore will not increase readership numbers or revenue from advertising.

Lastly, the author displays overconfidence in the quality of the content in The Mercury. There is nothing in the passage that shows that readers will still be interested in reading The Mercury and so the assumption that old readers will want to return to The Mercury is flawed.

To conclude, the author makes a weak argument based on several flawed assumptions, previously stated.


Many thanks for any advice!