The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.“Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this time period, most of the co

Essay topics:

The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.

“Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this time period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station’s coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have just canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to the program and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should restore the time devoted to weather and local news to its former level.”

Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence would be needed in order to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.

The business manager's statement to advocate for the restoration of weather and local news to his TV station's late-night news program is both sensible and compelling. One would be correct to feel alerted when, in addition to complaints from viewers about the major change in news content, there also seems to be consequences from another group of stakeholders, the local businesses who is a revenue source for the TV channel. This gives the manager enough cause of concern to warrant further investigation. The suggestions below will give him a more comprehensive understanding of the impact from the program change, and it is highly recommended that more time is spent to understand the entire picture before the manager makes a decision on whether to restore the former time devoted to weather and local news. Throughout his investigation, it is possible that he finds the benefits of the change towards more national news reporting outweigh the reprecussions he evidenced in the statement.

First, it is worth invetigating the complaints received from viewers. Are these complaints broad-based, or do they come from a narrow group of dissenters while the population-at-large is contented with the shift towards national news coverage? Anytime there is a major change, there will almost always be proponents and critics, and the information that the business manager lacks here is the views of the proponents. To consider both sides, the business manager can do a survey with a sample size representative of their viewership, and ask the survey participants specifically on how they feel about the programming shift. In addition, the business manager can also look into current viewership statistics and compare them to one year ago. Has late-night viewership gone up? If it has, that would be inconsistent with the complaints he received about the lack of weather and local news coverage, as it would seem that the national news is attracting more viewers. In that instance, it may be that the critics of the change - while loud in their claims - is not representative of the entire viewership of the station and thus their suggestion should not be given as much weight.

Second, the manager should look into the reason that local businesses have cancelled their advertising contract, and also determine whether this is ultimately a problem for the station. In the case that viewership has increased and broadened - say, people in other areas of the country now tune-in to the late night news in this channel because national news coverage is more relevant to them than local news and weather - it may be that the TV station's business model automatically increased advertising costs in proportion to viewership, and the small businesses can no longer afford to advertise on the channel. This would still be a legitimate concern if the TV station is unable to fill up their advertising slots; however, it would make sense that the increased viewership would increase advertising interest from national and international companies. Another explanation for the cancelled advertising contract could simply be that the local or broader economy has suffered a downturn in the most recent year, and local businesses are focused on cutting costs in areas such as advertising. In the case of changing economic conditions, restoring the channel back to its former coverage will not bring the advertising revenue from these local businesses back. The argument would make sense only if local businesses state that they have cancelled their advertising contracts because the TV station is no longer attracting their target customers, and also if the revenue from local business advertising cannot be supplanted by national or international brands advertising on the channel.

As the business manager for a TV station, he or she is simply doing his or her job when expressing these new concerns. However, the most crucial part of making an informed decision is to have an informed view. Thus, I would suggest that more specific evidence that the shift in their programming has been harmful is needed before a decision is made to restore the channel back to its former coverage.

Votes
Average: 7.5 (1 vote)
Essay Categories

Comments

Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 14, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'managers'' or 'manager's'?
Suggestion: managers'; manager's
The business managers statement to advocate for the restorati...
^^^^^^^^
Line 5, column 1181, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...ion should not be given as much weight. Second, the manager should look into the...
^^^^^^^^^

Discourse Markers used:
['also', 'first', 'however', 'if', 'look', 'may', 'second', 'so', 'still', 'thus', 'while', 'in addition', 'such as']

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments

Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.258241758242 0.25644967241 101% => OK
Verbs: 0.142857142857 0.15541462614 92% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0865384615385 0.0836205057962 103% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0508241758242 0.0520304965353 98% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0467032967033 0.0272364105082 171% => Less pronouns wanted. Try not to use 'you, I, they, he...' as the subject of a sentence
Prepositions: 0.120879120879 0.125424944231 96% => OK
Participles: 0.0357142857143 0.0416121511921 86% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.95334638221 2.79052419416 106% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0274725274725 0.026700313972 103% => OK
Particles: 0.00137362637363 0.001811407834 76% => OK
Determiners: 0.118131868132 0.113004496875 105% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0274725274725 0.0255425247493 108% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.00961538461538 0.0127820249294 75% => OK

Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 4186.0 2731.13054187 153% => OK
No of words: 678.0 446.07635468 152% => Less content wanted.
Chars per words: 6.17404129794 6.12365571057 101% => OK
Fourth root words length: 5.10278680062 4.57801047555 111% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.367256637168 0.378187486979 97% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.306784660767 0.287650121315 107% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.219764011799 0.208842608468 105% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.1401179941 0.135150697306 104% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.95334638221 2.79052419416 106% => OK
Unique words: 288.0 207.018472906 139% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.424778761062 0.469332199767 91% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
Word variations: 52.8304139195 52.1807786196 101% => OK
How many sentences: 22.0 20.039408867 110% => OK
Sentence length: 30.8181818182 23.2022227129 133% => OK
Sentence length SD: 88.3474194809 57.7814097925 153% => OK
Chars per sentence: 190.272727273 141.986410481 134% => OK
Words per sentence: 30.8181818182 23.2022227129 133% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.590909090909 0.724660767414 82% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 5.14285714286 78% => OK
Language errors: 2.0 3.58251231527 56% => OK
Readability: 61.4966478949 51.9672348444 118% => OK
Elegance: 1.72571428571 1.8405768891 94% => OK

Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.546672959254 0.441005458295 124% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.12868533909 0.135418324435 95% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0587018976866 0.0829849096947 71% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.571977862326 0.58762219726 97% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.150487499214 0.147661913831 102% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.237845422662 0.193483328276 123% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.100666303719 0.0970749176394 104% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.54163400288 0.42659136922 127% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.115531315738 0.0774707102158 149% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.409477539153 0.312017818177 131% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.117726419173 0.0698173142475 169% => OK

Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 7.0 8.33743842365 84% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 9.0 6.87684729064 131% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.82512315271 124% => OK
Positive topic words: 7.0 6.46551724138 108% => OK
Negative topic words: 7.0 5.36822660099 130% => OK
Neutral topic words: 3.0 2.82389162562 106% => OK
Total topic words: 17.0 14.657635468 116% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?

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Rates: 75.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.5 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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Note: This is not the final score. The e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.