How we checked Star FM 89.7
Everything published about this station was read from the station's own website or its own stream, and every fact below names the page it came from and the year it was read. We changed 1 thing about this entry. We also found 5 things we could have published and decided not to.
What we publish, and where each part came from
| What we say | Read from | When |
|---|---|---|
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Description
Star FM Zimbabwe runs its own site at starfm.co.zw, and that site is a news-heavy radio station site: a presenter page headed "Meet the faces behind the voices", a Shows page, a Contact page, and a large and actively maintained newsroom output covering Zimbabwe. Its own published categories show where the weight sits: Local with 116 items, Top Stories 83, Business 55, Regional 25, Entertainment 15, International 12 and Sports 4. Its music identity shows through its show titles, which include Sungura Wednesdays and Zimdancehall Overdrive, both Zimbabwean genres. I could read the site's own pages and content but not its rendered pages: see WITHHELD.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Artists
none established. The site publishes no now-playing panel, no recently played list and no playlist.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Contact route
Good, from its own Contact page. A studio mobile telephone number, a separate marketing landline, an email address on the starfm.co.zw domain, and a working contact form taking name, email and message. No social accounts are linked on the pages I could read.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Contact page
https://starfm.co.zw/contact/
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Era
Not published.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Music
A speech and music mix weighted towards news and current affairs, with Zimbabwean music strands named in its own show titles, Sungura and Zimdancehall among them.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Language
English on the site, in every page title, show title, presenter name and news story I read. Note that two of the presenter names the station publishes, "Ndini Baba Vako" and "Miss Nyenge", are Shona, and Sungura is a Zimbabwean genre, so Shona output on air is likely; the site does not say so and I have not asserted it.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Kind
A live station with its own newsroom producing original bylined reporting. Its own newsroom output was last added to three months before the date of reading, and its static pages were last revised in 2024.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Worth knowing
The station's own pages are reachable only through its content interfaces. Its site root issues a permanent redirect to its parent group's radio portal, so every rendered page is unreachable from here, while its sitemaps and its own content API serve the same pages' text without obstruction. The presenters, shows and contact details above all come from the station's own published content that way.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Where
Zimbabwe. The station's marketing telephone number is a Harare number and its newsroom datelines are Zimbabwean, including Goromonzi and Kadoma. The frequency is withheld below.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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On air
Its Presenters page names Babongile, Dee Knife, Dj Tatz Bless, Ndini Baba Vako and Miss Nyenge. Its front page presenter block names Steve Vickers, Iyati, DJ Mox, Babongile and Dee Knife. The two lists disagree: see WITHHELD. Named journalists in its own bylines include Talent Hwari and Lastword Musekiwa, with other items credited to "Online Desk".
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
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Programmes
Six shows appear as tiles in the Shows carousel on its own front page: The Morning Galaxy, The Crossover, Breakfast Club, Sungura Wednesdays, Zimdancehall Overdrive, and one further tile whose only label is a number. No airtimes are published. The Shows page itself carries only embedded video.
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Star FM Zimbabwe's own site at starfm.co.zw, read through its own sitemap and content API | 2026 |
What we corrected
Each of these changed a field in our own entry. The reasoning is the researcher's own, recorded when the change was made.
| Field | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| homepage url | https://www.starfm.co.zw/#&panel1-9 → https://zimpapersradio.co.zw/ | Two separate problems with the stored value. First, the fragment: the stored address ends '#&panel1-9', which is an in-page tab anchor and not a homepage, so it needs stripping in any case. Second, and decisive, the clean address does not stay on its own domain. https://www.starfm.co.zw/ answers with an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently to https://zimpapersradio.co.zw/, and so does every page path I tried on it (/presenters/, /contact/, /news/, /?page_id=17). Because that lands off the registrable domain starfm.co.zw, the stored URL would be refused by the guard, so the address it actually lands on is what I am proposing, and that destination is the operator's own: Star FM is part of the Zimpapers group and zimpapersradio.co.zw is that group's radio portal, to which the station itself permanently redirects its whole domain. One limitation to record honestly, because a listener may query it: I could not read the destination. zimpapersradio.co.zw answers every request from this network with a Cloudflare interstitial, including its robots.txt and its sitemap, so I have not confirmed by eye that the portal presents Star FM as its own channel rather than as one of several group stations. I did read the station's own content, presenters, shows and contact details, through starfm.co.zw's own sitemap and content API, which are not behind the redirect; that is the basis for the findings but it is not a homepage. If a residential browser finds that the portal is a group index with no Star FM page of its own, this field should be cleared to null instead. |
What we found and did not publish
Material that would have made this page fuller, and was refused. A page with five named presenters looks better than a page with none even when the five are a website theme's demonstration content, and the difference is invisible to a reader. So it is recorded here instead.
| What we could have said | Why we did not |
|---|---|
| A single current presenter lineup | The station's own two lists conflict and I will not merge them into one roster as though they agreed. The Presenters page names Dj Tatz Bless, Ndini Baba Vako and Miss Nyenge, none of whom appear on the front page; the front page names Steve Vickers, Iyati and DJ Mox, none of whom appear on the Presenters page. Only Babongile and Dee Knife appear on both. I have published both lists attributed to their pages. I also normalised one front page entry that reads "Dee Knife 2", which is an image file suffix for a second picture of Dee Knife and not a second presenter.
source |
| The frequency 89.7 | The station's own site never states it. I searched every page and every media title its content API serves and found no frequency figure at all. The one apparent match was a coincidental digit run inside an image filename's UUID, which is not evidence. The number in this row's title may well be right but it is not published on the station's own site, so I have not confirmed it.
source |
| A publication date of today for the lead story "Zimbabwe Launches National Framework to Tackle Adolescent Pregnancy Crisis" | The front page's Trending block stamps it with the current date, which would make the site look freshly updated. Its actual published date, from the station's own content record, is 2026-06-24, and that is also the newest item on the whole site. The Trending block is rendering today's date, not a publication date.
source |
| The parent group's other stations, and anything from the group radio portal | The suspicion of bleed from the Zimpapers group's other stations was well founded, and the cleanest guard against it was that everything above comes from starfm.co.zw's own pages. I read nothing from the group portal, and could not have: it answers every request from here, including its robots.txt and its sitemap, with a Cloudflare interstitial.
source |
| Show titles as a reliable current lineup | The six titles above are read from the file names of the tiles in the Shows carousel, which is the operator's own naming but is a schedule published as pictures. One tile's label is only a number and I have not invented a title for it, and no airtimes exist to publish. WHAT WOULD CLOSE THE REST: one load of https://zimpapersradio.co.zw/ and of https://starfm.co.zw/ from a residential browser. A Cloudflare interstitial is a reputation block on this network rather than a human check, and a residential browser normally passes it without any interaction. That would confirm the frequency, resolve which presenter list is current, and confirm whether the group portal presents Star FM as its own channel, which the homepage correction below depends on.
source |
If you think something here is wrong
Tell us which fact and what you found instead. Everything above names its source and its date, so a disagreement can be settled by looking rather than argued. Where another site disagrees with us, it is usually because it is repeating a radio directory, and occasionally because we got it wrong. We would like to know which.
Read from the station's own material; this page is generated from the
catalogue as it stands now, so it changes when the research does. Research
current as at 2026.
This entry began as: Star FM 89.7 — listed via Radio Browser · https://www.starfm.co.zw/#&panel1-9