• AFP, Monday, August 25, 2008 11:15 AM

Yahoo is aiming to turn Yahoo News into a major news organization, a la Reuters or The Associated Press. According to AFP, the Web giant is moving away from aggregating others' news content and is instead cutting deals with wire services and investing heavily in its own roster of reporters.

"We have been doing a lot of original reporting and we are going to be doing a lot more," director of editorial programming Jessica Barron told AFP in an interview. Yahoo News already reaches about half a billion people worldwide.

"Our aim is to reach these bigger names and use our reporting talent to break news," Barron said. "We are really going for the kinds of questions that will make news." For the Democratic and Republican party conventions, Yahoo is teaming with Politico reporters to cover the event; the team will field questions on behalf of Yahoo's users and relay the answers online.

Read the whole story at AFP »