From Channel 4's Web site:
A late night dining tradition along Buffalo's Elmwood strip may soon be coming to an end.
News 4 has learned the owner of Pano's Restaurant is considering scaling back his hours.
The restaurant opened on the first day of the Blizzard of '77.
Since then, it has been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
There's no word yet on why the owner is considering cutting the restaurant's hours.
Note in the edit history ( ) of the Wikinews article here: that the Wikinews article was published on the 21 of August, one day prior to the Channel 4 story.
Note the quotes about the blizzard of 77:
Wikinews: Pano's opened in 1977 on the day of the blizzard of '77' and has "remained open for 24 hours since then", only closing for an hour at a time on the weekends to clean up and prepare the restaurant for breakfast, said Georgiadis.
Channel 4 according to WNY Media: The restaurant opened on the first day of the Blizzard of '77. Since then, it has been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Also note that an e-mail was sent to Channel 4 alerting them to the story on Wikinews, but the e-mail did NOT mention any piece of the article and had a link to the copyright rules in reprinting or airing material used from Wikinews articles. They failed to cite Wikinews as a source or original author.
Plagerism is illegal.
Plagiarism is how it's spelled, and it's not necessarily illegal. Just unethical. Copyright infringement is illegal, but since Wikinews runs a creative commons license, anyone can use it with attribution. The thing with Channel 4 is that a reporter can use Wikinews as a tip, and then call Giorgiadis himself, get an almost identical quote, and then report it without giving Wikinews any attribution.
Plagerism is taking someone elses Idea and presenting it as your own idea, in wrighting. As long as you don't say it is your own idea it isn't plagerism. Granted the source could be wrong but that isn't plagerism. The other question is was the writen story just a writen verson of what they said on TV. The fact is that almost all the news on the the internet is from some other source. There isn't much investgative stories writen by someone who works for that papper they are mostly from news sources. That is generaly how the modern news media is.
Not that I condone plagiarism- but it seems to me that Panos being open 24/7 since the blizzard is Common Knowledge- and it is not necessarily plagiarism if two sources report it... especially if the wording isn't even the same...
Did you consider the possibility that whoever at Channel 4 responsible for the story was too stupid to know the difference between Wikinews and WNY Media?
I find it curious that the info is attributed to WNY Media by Channel 4.
Plagerists usually don't provide attribution.
Hopefully, someone at Channel 4 will do the right thing to rectify this situation.
Good luck!