While everyone else is running away from the newspaper business, Yahoo! is running straight at it. According to an interesting profile that the AFP has up today, Yahoo! is planning to lean on its huge global audience of over 500 million people to build out its own original news reporting arm.

The site has already landed some huge interviews — including one with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, US president George W. Bush’s first online interview, and one with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “We get these interviews because we have this global audience of 500 million viewers,” Jessica Barron, the site’s director of editorial programming, told the AFP…