Herald Newspaper Zimbabwe (1980) Ltd is the oldest newspaper publisher and commercial printer in Zimbabwe, as well as being easily the largest publisher of newspapers, having dominated the industry for almost 120 years. The company is the proprietor of Zimbabwe’s leading daily newspapers, The Herald, The Chronicle and the H-Metro and owns two Sunday newspapers operating in tandem with the dailies, The Sunday Mail and The Sunday News. The largest Provincial newspaper in Zimbabwe, The Manica Post, a weekly, anchors the Mutare branch. In recent decades Zimbabwe newspapers launched two newspapers in the two main indigenous languages, Kwayedza, a Shona weekly in Harare, and Umthunywa, an Ndebele weekly in Bulawayo.

A magazine, Zimtravel covers tourism, and five years ago Zimbabwe Newspapers and New Era Newspapers of Namibia jointly launched a regional weekly, The Southern Times. Besides being the biggest newspaper publisher in the country, Zimbabwe Newspapers is the only publisher and printer operating as a public company, having been floated on March 8 1927 then as the Rhodesian Printing and Publishing Company Limited. It changed its name in 1980 when Zimbabwe became independent. The 1927 launch incidentally makes it one of the oldest listings still on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. For more than 80 years any reader has had the opportunity to buy and trade in the shares of “their newspaper”, and many have taken that opportunity, the company encouraging hundreds of smaller investors to join the big institutional investors in taking a stake in the equity. Only in the very worst of times has the dividend been deferred. Zimbabwe Newspapers has the newspaper offices in Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare and commercial printing works in Harare and Bulawayo. Gweru hosts a newspaper bureau and commercial office, while journalists are stationed in Chinhoyi, Masvingo, and Beitbridge.