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

HISajjad1994,

Can you please evaluate below AWA essay and provide feedback?

Prompt : “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 argument claims that the Mecury should reduce it’s price to increase it’s circulation and earn more revenues in form of advertisement. To support this author states that since lower priced new-paper started five years ago the circulation of the Mecury has declined. Stated this way the argument fails to mention several key factors, on the basis of which argument could be evaluated. The argument is based on weak assumptions for which there is no clear evidence.
First, the argument readily assumes that comparatively high price of The Mercury newspaper is the only reason for decrease in the readers. This statement is stretched because there could be various reasons such as quality of reporting, range and variety of news reported, etc due to which circulation would have decreased. For example, people might prefer reporting of local news or regional political issues which might not be extensively covered in The Mercury. Clearly in that case lowering the price of the newspaper would have help to increase the circulation. The argument could be much clear if, for example, it stated readers have exclusively cited price as main reason for not buying The Mercury.
Second the argument claim that increased circulation will result into increased sell of advertising space. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any direct correlation between increase in circulation and increase in advertisement revenues. Though common sense dictates newspaper with wider circulation will be desirable for advertisers but there could be other factors such as readership demographics, which will guide advertisers’ decision.
Lastly, the argument would be more convincing if we had evidence to claim lowering price will increase circulation and increased circulation would result in increased advertisement revenues.
In conclusion, the argument is flawed due to above mentioned reasons. It could be considerably strengthened if detailed analysis of factors contributing for declined readers is done. Without the knowledge of full contributing factors, one cannot assess full merits of the decision. Hence the argument remains unsubstantiated and flawed.

Good Luck