When Your “Take-Home” Can Hardly Take You Home: Moonlighting and the Quest for Economic Survival in the Zimbabwean Press.

Using empirical data from in-depth interviews with journalists drawn from across the Zimbabwean mainstream press, this chapter examines how the Zimbabwean economic and political context has, over the years, nurtured an environment in which journalists “illicitly” incorporate extra paid work (for other news organisations) into their daily work routines as a way of supplementing their poor salaries and surviving the economic challenges facing the country. The study argues that this practice, commonly referred as “moonlighting”, points to the challenges that the material realities of working as a journalist for a poor salary imposes on African journalists. These conditions not only differentiate African journalists from their counterparts in the economically developed countries of the North, but also highlight how the conditions of material deprivation tend to subvert conventionalized notions of professionalism and ethical standards. The paper further contends that moonlighting also articulates the consequences of a restricted media environment in which stories by local journalists that criticize government policy and expose social ills mainly find space in “independent” and foreign news organizations