internet - Baidu to become a news portal?

China's top search engine Baidu has obtained a license to start a news portal, reports Seeking Alpha.

A government source said that the country’s State Council Information Office [SCIO] granted Baidu an Internet news content service license, allowing Baidu.com to do its own reporting rather than simply posting news search results.

That would be news for two reasons. First, Baidu is broadening its scope, a tendency that is seen among more Chinese internet giants, but would make it look even more different than Google, the number two search engine in China.
The permission to do its own reporting might even be more important and a break with the tradition that internet portals can only repackage news that has been published first by "official" news sources. It is still a rumor, so we would have to see whether the story holds.

Update: Two additions from my netwerk. First, it is old news: the Chinese media had this already two weeks ago. Second, they got the same license as the other news portals, so they will not be able to collect news themselves, but can only reuse officially published news.