http://www.politico.com/story/2009/12/the-art-of-the-tick-tock-030248

he front page of Sunday’s New York Times features a much longer reconstruction of Obama’s Afghanistan deliberations, with the same Veterans Day scene and (nearly) the same quote: “‘I want this pushed to the left,’ he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.”

The tidbit neatly serves both the press and the White House: The reporters appear to be getting a juicy scoop – the sort of take-you-there detail that might turn up in a Bob Woodward book years after the fact. And the president’s aides are dishing an irresistible illustration of a take-charge president’s proactive approach to his decision to commit 30,000 more troops to a war that has begun to look like a quagmire.

This type of story – known in the trade as a “tick-tock,” for its heavy reliance on chronology – has become de rigueur for the big papers in the days after a major Washington event. Sunday’s Washington Post also has an Afghanistan tick-tock that posted on the web Saturday afternoon, five minutes after The New York Times’ opus. The L.A. editors rushed the piece into type after a sit-down White House briefing on Thursday, knowing that competitors were working on their own versions.