Herald boosts countrywide news coverage

TODAY The Herald upgrades its coverage of Zimbabwe news.

In July we introduced an Eastern Edition for Mashonaland East and Manicaland, and a month later a Southern Edition for Masvingo and the south-west of Zimbabwe and were planning a roll-out two editions for northern Zimbabwe and central Zimbabwe, with a fifth edition for Harare and its metropolitan area.

But it quickly became apparent that many readers wanted to read about at least two areas in more detail, the area where they lived and the area where they had strong ties: for example the area where they or their parents or grandparents came from; the area where they have in-laws; the area where they went to school or once worked. Zimbabweans are far more mobile than we anticipated.

So we have had to rethink how we could satisfy our readers, keeping the far greater local coverage we were giving or planning on giving in editions, while at the same time ensuring that all readers could read about other areas.

Our solution is to return to a single edition, but to retain the expanded local coverage through a set of five dedicated pages, one for each of the areas our editions were covering or were going to cover. In effect, we are giving all readers all editions.

These five pages will cover: Mashonaland East and Manicaland; Mashonaland Central and West; Masvingo and South-West Zimbabwe; Midlands and North-West Zimbabwe, and the five local government areas of Harare Metropolitan area.

The Herald does not circulate much in western and southern Zimbabwe, areas covered by our sister daily, Chronicle. But as there are significant numbers of people in the north and east of Zimbabwe with ties to those areas, we have decided to include a sample of Chronicle stories of major events although Chronicle will give more detailed coverage and will cover readers and residents’ views and

concerns.

In order to create the extra space for this coverage, we have moved our main Editorial page and our two analysis pages and combined these with our former Review section to create a new section called The Herald Insight.

So The Herald now has three sections: the main news and sports section, the new Insight and The Herald Business.

We hope this expanded Herald will serve all our readers and advertisers better and manage to combine our desire to give them news of their own areas, the rest of the country and the national news and sport, plus opinion and commentary and good business news.

The very brief weather forecasts, a symbol and maximum temperature, for the 25 cities and towns sampled on the local news pages are drawn from the AccuWeather service.