The resignations, firings, and ousters of senior government officials have always been big news. In 1991, two weeks after announcing that he’d stay on through the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term, the chief of staff John Sununu resigned with a handwritten letter that ended, “It really has been great!!!” (The President’s son, George W. Bush, reportedly dealt Sununu his death blow by the White House horseshoe pit.) But the drama, as well as the frequency, of such occurrences during the Trump Administration has prompted national publications to begin working on such stories before they happen—because, the thinking goes, they very likely will happen.

One White House reporter for a large newspaper told me in an e-mail, under the condition of anonymity, that he has worked on a number of prewrites. “It's necessary,” he said. He listed a few notable examples of this Administration’s sudden personnel moves. “Reince fired via tweet, Tillerson fired via tweet, McMaster, Bannon—everyone saw those coming. Spicer, everyone knew it couldn’t last too much longer. Pruitt you knew it was going to happen. I’m sure people have them ready for Kelly”—meaning John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, who had been rumored to be on his way out of the White House until earlier this week, when reports said that he intended to stay. The reporter went on, “You start hearing that Trump is souring on someone, or that someone is souring on Trump, and you start getting it ready. There has never been so much turnover in such a short time. It is the only constant in Trump’s world. He sees people as entirely disposable.”

“It’s sort of like the old long-standing practice of having prewritten obits,” David Lauter, the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, told me recently by phone, referring to the writing of obituaries for famous or important people, months or even years before they die. “We don’t do every single one,” he added. “As with obits, you make a judgment of ‘How significant is this person?’ But we’ve done at least a dozen resignation prewrites so far.”

Lauter noted the demands of digital publishing as an additional impetus for the change, “and,” as he put it, “the eat-it-up news cycle that we’re all dealing with these days.” He went on, “But it’s mostly driven by the nature of the Trump Administration, where you just never know when the axe is gonna fall on somebody. But you do know that the axe is gonna fall with fairly predictable regularity. And you know the cast of characters who are on the chopping block at any given time. So it just makes sense to get these kinds of stories ready.”

The event that precipitated this new practice was Reince Priebus’s dismissal as Trump’s chief of staff, last July. Trump announced the news that he had replaced Priebus with Kelly at 4:49 P.M. on a Friday. “We weren’t quite ready for Reince,” Lauter said, “which, I guess, was probably because Reince wasn’t quite ready, either.” It took the L.A. Times twenty-six minutes after Trump’s tweet to get a quick squib of a story up about the news on their Web site. In contrast, last month, when Trump tweeted that he’d accepted Scott Pruitt’s resignation as the head of the E.P.A., the paper had a full article, more than a thousand words long, published three minutes later. The Washington Post and the Times also posted their lengthy Pruitt pieces quickly. All of the stories referenced Pruitt’s “lavish spending” and, as evidence, pointed to the forty-three-thousand-dollar secure phone booth he commissioned for his personal use.

Lauter was explicit about the relationship between speedy breaking-news reporting and readership numbers. “That’s critical for attracting readers who may become online subscribers and for keeping our existing online subscribers satisfied that they can count on us to deliver the news they’re interested in,” Lauter said.

Most of the paper’s White House reporters have worked on these prewrites. Lauter figures that half of the paper’s other D.C. reporters have written at least one resignation piece ahead of time, too. “It sort of depends on who the person resigning is,” Lauter explained. “The person here who covers environmental issues”—Evan Halper—“had a Scott Pruitt piece in the can for several months, which he kept updating.”

Lauter continued, “We’ve updated the John Kelly one quite a number of times now.” What about Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, whose future has been the subject of intense speculation since Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki? “I’ll have to check on that and see if that one’s ready,” Lauter said. “I know it’s being worked on.”

These prewrites are becoming part of newsroom lore. A reporter at a major online publication, who also requested anonymity, shared a story about working on them. “At one point,” she told me in an e-mail, “one person on our policy desk was tasked with updating a prewrite that hadn’t been touched in a month—and that assumed the official in question was resigning in disgrace instead of frustration.” But circumstances had changed since the prewrite was last worked on. Circumstances had become less clear. So the end of the piece was changed. “The last line of this prewrite—and it stayed this way for weeks—was: ‘but he could not withstand TK WHATEVER HE COULD NOT WITHSTAND,’ ” the reporter said. The term “TK” is a common shorthand in newsrooms. It stands in for an at-present unknown fact.