A recent chance meeting with someone who it turned out worked for a major Japanese motorcycle manufacturer had me pondering something he said for quite a while after. Employed as part of a team organising events - bike launches etc - he mentioned that content creators were people who interested his company more and more when it came to promoting their products. Magazines, he told me, no longer enjoyed the influence they once had.
It was a copy of Bike magazine from October 1979 that got me thinking about his comment, one featuring my old Kawasaki Z1000ST (registration FLA476T), an ex-demonstrator I’d bought direct from Kawasaki UK after it had done the press rounds (Motorcycle Sport tested the model in their June 1980 edition). In an article that wouldn’t look out of place in today’s MSL, the testers took the bike up to the Outer Hebrides with her sister, a Kawasaki Z1000 mkll. Producing a wonderful piece of travel writing spread over half a dozen pages that’s both entertaining and informative, the author creates a journey, a couple of road tests, and something that when finished you know you’ll return to time and again. Even though the accompanying photos are all black and white, it’s of no consequence; they’re secondary to the words.
The bike itself was superb, a superbike from a golden age of motorcycling: super reliable, super fast, and super smooth. And when compared with modern motorcyles, super simple. The big Zed never went back to a dealership or visited a professional workshop from the day I bought it at six months old; everything it needed, I did myself. There was excellence there, not through excessive complexity or superficial styling, but because of a depth somehow lost since. I felt at one with that bike, engaged, as if we were partners on the road, in a strange way speaking the same language.
And of content creators and magazines? I watch streaming sites, I’m sure most people do - they are at times very useful. If I’m interested in a particular bike or bit of kit, I’ll spend time on YouTube looking at various ‘content’. But none of it is immersive in the way of good journalism; nothing that I’ve seen speaks to you personally, but rather at you as a member of the audience. A reader is an individual, where a follower is simply part of a group. And a well written, properly researched, and professionally presented magazine article, will always be better, in both quality and memorability.
There was no internet when I bought my Z000ST, but the mkII tested in Bike had ABS: acrylonitrile butadiene styrene used in the creation of its Windjammer fairing.
