I am told that the best businesses are the ones whose models you can explain clearly and concisely, so how’s this? Track Record is where good people write good stuff about good stuff.
We like sport (all sport, not just football) so we’ll do that. We like music (all sorts of music, particularly when it’s played live) so we’ll do that too. And we like fun stuff, so we’ll give ourselves the freedom to write about games, television, movies, cocktails, books and anything else that we can crowbar under the heading of entertainment.
We don’t do AI. Sort of. The producers of our podcasts may use AI-tools to do clever stuff like tearing through an audio file and removing sound pollution. Banning that is like banning pocket calculators; it would be noble, but self-defeating.
But we’ll never use AI for content creation. All of our articles are written by paid writers, either freelance or in-house, they’re edited by an NCTJ-trained editor, the pages are mapped out by a skilled designer. We would rather run a modest site with a handful of new articles a day than serve up 10,000 servings of AI slop.
We don’t do politics. We don’t do the culture wars. We don’t contrive controversy and we don’t do rancour. Not here anyway. We’ll hold court with the best of them in the pub after work, but we want Track Record to be a refuge from that sort of thing. The world is increasingly terrifying, so take what you can manage from the newspapers and the rolling news stations, look after yourselves on social media and when you feel that you’ve had your limit, come here to decompress.
You’ll notice that we don’t have banner ads or pop-up ads either. That’s a deliberate policy. We’ve worked hard on this website and we want you to enjoy it without suddenly being bombarded with bright lights, flashing pictures or haunting images of bunions. If we ever do take advertising, it will be tastefully welded into the page, like an old fashioned magazine.
So how is this enterprise expected to make any money? Well, you can consider us a hub for content. We have podcasts that carry advertising, we have videos that can be sponsored. We have a crack team of creators ready to be commissioned.
Everything we do is made with the same commitment to quality, so if you like our writing, you’ll probably like these things too. And we’ll use our articles to tell you about some of them. So if you see a podcast or a video, please give it a click, give it a listen, give it a follow and if you really like it, give it a review too.
Everything you’ve just read is completely counter-intuitive. It’s all a massive gamble. We’re betting that enough people out there still believe in quality over quantity. We’ve been told for ages that the way forward is to invest in the loudest voices, it’s to outflank the craziest opinions, it’s to flood the market with AI-generated content. We don’t believe that’s the case. We’re going to do the complete opposite.
So enjoy the content, tell your friends about it and tell us what you’d like to see on the site. We’re always open to good ideas.