A. G. Brander put out the first Yass Evening Tribune in 1879, entering a town already served by the Yass Courier, which had been printing since 1854. Brander took over the Gunning Times in 1888, and in April 1929 his two papers merged as the Yass Tribune-Courier, the issue numbering carrying on from the Tribune's 5,108th edition before restarting at number two. The masthead's own account dates its service to Yass and the surrounding districts to 1857. It passed to Rural Press, then to Fairfax Media, and now sits with Australian Community Media, which acquired the Fairfax regional portfolio. Early editions of both papers have been digitised through the National Library of Australia's newspaper programme, and the Tribune-Courier archive runs to more than 44,000 searchable pages covering 1857 to 1954. Today, Yass Tribune is mainly focused on Yass and Southern Tablelands local news, council coverage, human interest stories, local sport, agricultural reporting, tributes and community noticeboard content, from their base in Yass, New South Wales. One interesting fact: When its two papers merged in 1929 the new title kept the old issue number, publishing as number 5,108, then reset to number two for the following edition. The sequence its founder had built over fifty years was abandoned after a single issue.