Stories Number 1, 6 and 13

Who knew that checkout lines were so important to the print industry? Well, lots of people, and probably none more than Yankee Magazine, whose original small-form size allowed it to dominate checkout line distribution, along with Readers Digest. Both have suffered since a whole sorority of women's books adopted the size over the past 15 years.

Now, some of those magazine publishers are blaming smartphones for robbing them of attention in the grocery store stockyards.

The idea is that where once the boredom and embarrassment of standing by your groceries caused you to become more interested in Cosmo than would ever otherwise be the case; now you just pop online and read the news.

"We do find a number of people, if stalled for a minute, will steal a look at their email or news feed," said David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines to the Financial Times.

Print executives may see a tough, continuing correction in front of them. They tend to charge one or two orders of magnitude more for advertising than the up-and-coming online equivalent media; and the content model they use is at times dependent on an audience literally being lined up and held immobilized in a state of boredom before an adequate number of them capitulate to buy the latest issue of a woman's magazine that contains a rotation of the same 30 articles. That's a tough portfolio to own.

The upside? In print, no one cares about "viewability."