About Yass Tribune

Yass Tribune

Overview

The Yass Tribune is the local newspaper for Yass and the Yass Valley in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, published in print and online by Australian Community Media (ACM). Yass township, roughly 52 kilometres north-west of Canberra on the Barton Highway, is the main centre of a local government area of 17,281 people at the 2021 census, which also takes in the villages of Murrumbateman, Binalong, Bowning, Gundaroo, Sutton, Bookham and Wee Jasper. The Tribune is a weekly title with a daily-updated website, and it carries a lineage among the oldest of any country newspaper in New South Wales: its direct line runs through the Yass Evening Tribune, first published in 1879, and the district's first newspaper, the Yass Courier, first published in 1854. The title remains in current publication — ACM was selling advertising against it in 2026 with digital audience measurement for May to July 2026, and monitoring of its website recorded it publishing through August and September 2026.

History

Newspaper publishing in Yass began with the Yass Courier, first published in 1854. The Yass Evening Tribune followed in 1879, founded by A. G. Brander, and was published under that name for half a century. Brander expanded the business in 1888 by taking over the Gunning Times. In April 1929 the district's two papers were combined under the name Yass Tribune-Courier; the numbering of the combined paper continued from the Tribune's previous issue, number 5108, before the sequence was restarted. Surviving runs of the Courier, the Evening Tribune and the Tribune-Courier have been digitised by the National Library of Australia through Trove as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, with the Tribune-Courier run catalogued from 1929 to 1955. The paper is published today under the shortened name Yass Tribune.

By the 2010s the Tribune was part of Fairfax Media's regional publishing arm, grouped with the ACT and Southern Inland titles. In April 2016 Fairfax's centralisation program reached the paper: its journalists were required to write, sub-edit, photograph and headline their own stories under the company's NewsNow model, and reporting at the time recorded that the Tribune had operated without an editor for nearly two years, that its only permanent journalist lived in Canberra, and that its editorial staffing had halved from 4.5 positions in 2012 to two. The paper also drew increasingly on stories from The Canberra Times, an arrangement that had not existed in earlier years. When Fairfax Media merged with Nine Entertainment in December 2018, the regional arm was separated, and in April 2019 Nine sold Australian Community Media to a joint venture led by Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz, taking the Tribune into ACM ownership.

In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit regional advertising, ACM suspended printing across its non-daily portfolio and the Tribune closed its doors for a period. The suspension prompted former television journalist Jasmin Jones and partners to launch an independent rival, the Yass Valley Times, and a local journalist, Andrew Hennell, also developed plans for a new weekly paper, only to find start-up ventures were not eligible for the government's regional media support funding. ACM resumed operations in Yass after the Australian Government's $50 million regional media support package was announced, and the Tribune returned to publication; the two papers have since served the valley in parallel.

Programming and Content

The Tribune covers the life of the Yass Valley: local news and human-interest stories, local sporting events and council news are the beats ACM itself names in describing the title to advertisers. Yass Valley Council — its meetings, services, planning decisions and finances — is a central subject for the district's paper of record, in a valley where local government decisions on roads, water and rates directly affect a dispersed rural population. Alongside its local coverage, the paper's website carries material from across the ACM network and from the Australian Associated Press wire; news monitoring of the site in August and September 2026 showed national and wire stories featuring prominently in its online feed alongside its valley coverage, a mix typical of ACM's smaller weeklies. The print edition remains the paper's traditional weekly record of the district, while the website publishes continuously.

Audience and Reach

The Tribune's audience is the population of the Yass Valley: about 6,800 people in Yass township itself at the 2021 census and 17,281 across the local government area, spread between the town, the growing commuter village of Murrumbateman and a ring of small rural villages, about 280 kilometres south-west of Sydney. The valley's proximity to Canberra shapes its readership — many residents commute to the capital for work while choosing a rural lifestyle — alongside the district's long-established farming community. The questions that dominate valley life are correspondingly local: in October 2026 Yass Valley Council voted to take a proposed special rate variation — a cumulative increase of about 76 per cent over four years, advanced after an independent review found an $8.3 million annual funding gap — out to six weeks of community consultation, the kind of council decision on which the district's paper of record is the community's standing source of report and debate. Yass has long been promoted as a fine-wool centre, a heritage reflected in the district's merino industry, and the valley has also developed a cool-climate wine industry and a tourism trade built on its heritage streetscape and nearby attractions such as the limestone caves of Wee Jasper. ACM measures the title's digital audience through the IPSOS iris panel; its advertiser brand page recorded Yass Tribune digital audience data for the period May to July 2026.

Digital Presence

The paper's website, yasstribune.com.au, operates on ACM's network platform under the masthead line "Yass news, sport and weather", publishing local, sport, entertainment and lifestyle content and updating daily; monitoring services recorded the site publishing new material throughout August and September 2026, including national news carried from the wire. Like other ACM titles, the site combines the paper's own district reporting with stories shared across the company's New South Wales and national network, and it serves as the digital edition point for the weekly print paper.

Ownership and Organisation

The Yass Tribune is published by Australian Community Media, the regional publishing group whose origins trace to Rural Press and The Land and which passed through Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment before its sale in April 2019 to the Catalano–Waislitz joint venture. Within ACM the title belongs to the group of small Southern Tablelands and ACT-region non-daily papers — the same operating group in which the Goulburn, Bowral, Queanbeyan, Crookwell and Braidwood titles were restructured alongside it in 2016 — and it is produced within ACM's centralised regional newsroom model, in which journalists file across print and digital platforms and production is shared across the network. In February 2025 ACM announced that all of its mastheads would move to one printed edition per week by 2032, a direction the Tribune — already a weekly — already reflects. Advertising for the title is sold through ACM, with print material delivered through the company's AdDrop system.

Contact and Availability

The Yass Tribune is published weekly in print for the Yass district and continuously online at yasstribune.com.au. Digital subscriptions and the paper's current contact points are provided through the website. Advertising enquiries are handled by ACM: its Yass Tribune brand page lists a sales contact on 0437 702 181 and ACM Enterprise on 1300 618 237.