Thondlana to Head NewsDay Team

Comment & Analysis
ZIMIND Publishers on Thursday made four key appointments to the leadership of NewsDay, a daily newspaper the group will be launching shortly.

ZIMIND Publishers on Thursday made four key appointments to the leadership of NewsDay, a daily newspaper the group will be launching shortly.

Barnabas Thondlana has been appointed Editor of NewsDay, the latest publication in the Zimind group.

Moses Mudzwiti is Managing Editor, Dumisani Muleya, who has been Assistant Editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, becomes the Group Political and Investigative Editor, while Constantine Chimakure is News Editor.

Chimakure held the same position on the Zimbabwe Independent.

The appointments are with effect from Tuesday.

Trevor Ncube, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard, in announcing the appointments, said discussions with the authorities regarding registration of NewsDay were on-going, adding indications were positive.

“We have been assured by the government following the GNU retreat that normalisation of the media landscape is a priority,” Ncube said. “We have been further assured that the process to get NewsDay registered is underway and on course.”

Ncube said Thondlana and Mudzwiti are an experienced and dynamic duo who will produce “an exciting newspaper for the Zimbabwe we want”.

“Chimakure is a hard-working journalist with a nose for news and will be an asset to NewsDay, while Muleya is by far the best investigative and political journalist the country has produced in recent years,” Ncube said.

“This is a winning team. The team, among other things, has been tasked with sifting through the hundreds of applications we have received and emerging with talent fit to produce a great newspaper,” Ncube said.

“We have been overwhelmed by responses to our recruitment drive from both the Diaspora and locally.” Thondlana has been in the newspaper industry for 20 years. He began his career at the Financial Gazette in 1989 and rose through the ranks to the position of News Editor.

In 1996 he left to join the Zimbabwe Independent as its first News Editor.

Two years later he left to join The Daily News as its first News Editor. A year later, he was back at the Zimbabwe Independent as Deputy Editor.

In 2001 he left to launch The Daily News on Sunday as its founding Editor. The paper was closed down in 2003 under Zimbabwe’s draconian media laws.

Thondlana has also worked for international news organisations such as the Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg News and Media24, among others.

Mudzwiti (46) spent the last 15 years working for major media houses in Namibia and South Africa.

These included Avusa, owners of The Sunday Times, and Independent News & Media, proprietors of The Star newspaper.

He started his career at The Daily Gazette in 1992 and a year later moved to Namibia where he worked for the Windhoek Advertiser.

“My final post in South Africa, before returning home last year, was that of Deputy Editor of The Times, a daily which is a sister publication to The Sunday Times,” Mudzwiti said.

Before that Mudzwiti worked as Night Editor of The Sowetan. By the time he left The Sowetan to start The Times, he had been promoted to Senior Assistant Editor.

Earlier he worked as a Sub-Editor for Martin Creamer’s Engineering News.

Mudzwiti later moved to the Cape Times, where he was Deputy News Editor. Subsequently he was promoted to Night News Editor of The Star based in Johannesburg.

He also had a stint as the News Editor for Business Report before moving to The Sowetan at the persuasion of John Dludlu, then its editor.

Chimakure has worked in the media over the past 15 years. He worked for the weekly Masvingo Mirror (1992 – 1996) as a reporter before joining the weekly Zimbabwe Mirror as a senior political reporter (1999-2001).

He was promoted to chief political reporter (2001-2002), but left the Zimbabwe Mirror in May 2002 to join the Business Tribune as chief business reporter until 2004 when the government shut down the newspaper.

He joined The Daily Mirror in September 2004 as chief political reporter and six months later was promoted to Deputy News Editor.

In June 2005 he was promoted to News Editor – a position he held until the newspaper collapsed in March 2007.

He joined the Zimbabwe Independent in June of 2007 as senior political reporter. Last year he was promoted to chief reporter.

Other appointments to the Newsday editorial team will be announced in due course.

BY OUR STAFF