The following appeared in an announcement issued by the publisher of The Mercury, a weekly newspaper:“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 t

The author concludes that since five years ago, The Bugle newspaper has started its business the circulation of The Mercury’s newspaper is declining and the best way for the author to overcome the loss is to reduce the price below that of The Bugle newspaper, at least until circulation increases to former levels. However, the conclusion relies on assumptions for which the author does not supply clear evidence.

The author assumes that lowering the prices of the Mercury newspaper is the best way to get more people to read it. In fact, the lowering the prices might be irrelevant to the failing of the sale of The Mercury newspaper. If, for example the present problem is because of the articles that are printed in The Bugle newspaper are better than The Mercury newspaper and that is why people are reading more The Bugle than The Mercury then lowering prices would have been a valid reason for, which the author has completely ignored it.

In addition, the facts that the author has mentioned about the readers who are not reading the Mercury newspaper are just 10k are little unacceptable. However, the author should have provided some evidence to support his argument and given some relevant data or reason about the readers of that particular area are not reading the mercury newspaper because of its higher prices.

Finally, the author assumes it will continue to lower its prices until it increases it’s level of circulation to the former, is baseless. The author gave its reason on the bases of the 10, 000 readers only and also without providing any relevant evidence to support his argument. As the argument stands, it is highly possible that the author may increase its level of circulation of readers from The Bugle newspaper but by then many other newspapers will be launched and the author has to compete with them again. Also, the new newspapers might be better in attracting customers for advertisements in their newspaper. So, the author’s assumption that better circulation will attract more advertisers is unsupported.

To strengthen the argument, the author should have provided some kind of back data that lowering the prices was actually helpful in increasing the circulation of newspaper. Although an attempt is made to make this very argument, the lack of supporting information provided weakens rather than strengthens the announcement. Information such as other newspaper agency’s are also following the same practice in order to increase its circulation could be introduced as reinforcement. As it stands, lowering prices itself of the newspaper, without any actual data research is not acceptable and hard to be convincing.