I opened Facebook to find that a friend had posted on my timeline. And to think that just a few years ago I didn’t even have a timeline. This was a link to an NPR story and a suggestion, actually more like a directive. “This story has your name all over it. I’ll be waiting for your blog!” she said.

I could have ignored that. I’m sitting here now thinking I should have ignored that. But my ego kicked in and I started wondering what it was about this article that made her think it would interest me. I mean, she is right. I am interested, somewhat appalled and feeling rather smug all at once. But that’s my problem. Why should I write about it?

So here’s the deal. The story is about a computer program that writes news stories. Hundreds of thousands of them, for places like Yahoo and the Associated Press. Because the AP is using them, there’s no doubt you are reading them – if you read news. It writes pretty basic stuff; there is after all a difference between news writing and news reporting. The computer isn’t gathering any facts. It gets that stuff from somewhere – maybe even someone – else, ingests it, digests it and defecates it out onto the screen.

NPR got this idea to put the computer to a test by pitting it against an actual reporter. They chose their White House correspondent Scott Horsley. And they chose a business story, the quarterly earnings of Denny’s. Scott might have had a leg up. Back when I used to bump into him at the NPR station in San Diego he was a business reporter and he is comfortable enough in his own skin to admit he was once a regular at Denny’s.

The competition had two parts. One was to judge the end product and the other was to get to that end first.

We all know where this is headed. The computer has already won at chess, Jeopardy and trying my patience. So it’s no surprise it was done with Denny’s in two minutes while Scott was savoring his greasy spoon prose for seven minutes. But part two, what did they write?

Here’s what the computer program shit out:

Denny’s Corporation on Monday reported first-quarter profit of 8.5 million dollars. The Spartanburg, South Carolina-based company said it had profit of 10 cents per share. The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of four analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 9 cents per share. The restaurant operator posted revenue of $120.2 million in the period, also beating Street forecasts. Three analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $117.1 million. Denny’s shares have risen nearly 6 percent since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $10.90, a climb of 61 percent in the last 12 months.

And here’s Scott’s:

Denny’s Corporation notched a grand slam of its own in the first quarter, earning a better-than-expected ten cents a share, as restaurant sales jumped by more than 7-percent. Operating revenues topped $120 million. Adjusted net income jumped 36 percent to $8.7 million. Denny’s is one of the nation’s largest full-service restaurant chains. The growth in sales suggests consumers are opening their pocketbooks for pancakes, eggs, and hash browns. Earnings were also helped by lower costs for raw materials. Denny’s results were also helped by the re-opening of the high-volume location inside the Las Vegas Casino Royale restaurant. After sales grew faster than expected in the first three months of the year, managers raised their sales forecast for the remainder of 2015.

The computer program may have come out ahead in search engine optimization, but Horsley comes out ahead in everything else.

The truth is, however, if these are supposed to be broadcast stories, they both suck. Honestly Scott, you get props for “grand slam” and did manage to mention Las Vegas, but what took you so damned long?

The cardinal rule of broadcast news is don’t bore the audience. If people aren’t still paying attention by the time you get to the end of the story, or if they forget what you said as soon as you’re done saying it, you’ve failed.

Scott lost me at “adjusted net income.” But in his defense, the story is a loser to begin with. Earnings at Denny’s for godsake. Nobody cares. Nobody. I doubt Denny even cares. The only reason anyone ever goes to Denny’s is because it’s still open after the bars close and you want something in your stomach when you throw up on your way home. So maybe you care if they announce they’re raising prices of their inedible menu, but that’s as far as it goes.

This whole computerized writing is another sign of the deterioration of news. Years ago the television station where I worked wanted news writers to both write the news and edit the video. I argued against it because, first, they are distinctly different skill sets and second, it takes longer to write and edit a story than it does to just write or just edit one. Yet the writers will still have the same number of stories to write and the deadline doesn’t change. When I said it would hurt the quality of the product the general manager actually snorted and I looked over to see him shaking his head.

Quality is such a quaint idea.

Not that we shouldn’t keep trying. I remember lamenting the consolidation of ownership in the media and was complaining to a friend who had worked at a couple television stations, a few newspapers, a magazine and at least one university that someday we would all be working for the phone company. “Yeah,” he said, “but those fuckers will need editors too.”

Apparently not.