Government ■ The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services must consider instituting an audit of the USF to enhance transparency and accountability of the usage of the funds so far to improve its usage. ■ The government must consider relaxing laws or regulations on content generation and the creation of community radio stations in Zimbabwe and enabling the entry of foreign investors in the sector. ■ The greatest challenge which the government needs to address is ensuring a more stable and predictable economic environment as a basis for a “solid business case” for other players in the media landscape, especially corporate players; this can help to spur innovation and better adaptation to the everchanging global media landscape within which the country locates and designs the local media landscape. Business/corporate media actors ■ There is a need to adopt a stakeholder-wide approach to help them have an improved understanding of these changes in the media landscape and facilitate the co-creation of strategies to understand the emergent media audiences and their media and information needs. Media support organisations such as MISA stand a good chance of leading this aspect and ensuring a synergy of efforts across actors in the media fraternity to come up with workable strategies towards improving the capacity of media actors to meet the media needs of the new audiences, notably in providing the much-needed thought-leadership. ■ Corporate media actors and all other media actors need to review their content generation and creation strategies and tailor them to be relevant and responsive to the lived realities or daily needs of the various media consumers. Academic/research institutions ■ Academic institutions are called upon to review and update their curriculum and training to accommodate the new media structures and actors and to develop tailor-made training. ■ There is need to expand and build upon further research with bigger data sets to 6. Conclusion THIS paper has argued how the long-term effects of Zimbabwe’s reconfigured political economy, exacerbated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, have wrought changes in Zimbabwe’s media landscape. This has resulted in a shift in old media structures, needs and consumption habits, a concomitant emergence of new media structures, and new audiences with different media needs and consumption habits. 34 There is no more going back to conventional media or old media structures dominated by print (newspapers and magazines), radio and television. The new media terrain is now dominated by online media, whose scope and purview have expanded to include usergenerated content, riding on new internet-based communication applications for sharing information. investigate the links between the reconfigured political economy and media. ‘ THERE is no more going back to conventional media or old media structures dominated by print (newspapers and magazines), radio and television.