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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, January 4, 2006

New CEO takes over at Dow Jones Feb. 1

Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, said yesterday its chief executive would step down as part of a management overhaul, putting a non-journalist at its helm for the first time in decades.

The decision to appoint chief operating officer Richard F. Zannino, 47, as CEO comes amid hard times in the newspaper industry and at Dow Jones, which saw its stock price slide nearly 18 percent in 2005.

Zannino, a former retail executive, will take over Feb. 1 from Peter Kann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been CEO since 1991. Kann will remain chairman until 2007.

Dow Jones also said that Journal publisher Karen Elliott House, who is married to Kann and was a contender for the CEO job, will leave the company by "mutual agreement."