New York, Jan. 4: In a management shake-up, Dow Jones & Co, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, named a successor Tuesday to its chief executive, Peter R. Kann, bypassing Kann’s wife, Karen Elliott House, publisher of The Journal, who is leaving the company.

Dow Jones picked its chief operating officer, Richard F. Zannino, as chief executive, ending the reign of one of the storied power couples of the corporate media world. Kann announced the changes Tuesday morning at his monthly meeting with senior managers.

Though House had a higher profile inside and outside the company, she reported to Zannino, and he increasingly was seen inside Dow Jones as the likely successor to Kann. Her rise had concerned some insiders who felt that it created a conflict for the chairman’s wife to hold such a senior post.

The appointment of Zannino, 47, who joined Dow Jones in 2001 as chief financial officer and is the first non-journalist to run the company in modern times, was welcomed on Wall Street, where the company’s shares rose sharply after the announcement. Along with the personnel changes, the company said its fourth-quarter earnings would be better than expected. Dow Jones shares rose $3.65 to close at $39.14.

The appointment could presage other major changes at Dow Jones and The Journal, its flagship paper. The announcement comes at a tumultuous time for the newspaper industry, with readers and advertisers defecting to the Internet. But the last several years, since the dot-com bubble burst, have been particularly difficult for The Journal, which is more dependent than most papers on technology and financial advertising.

As reporters, Kann and House both won Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting at The Journal and rose quickly up the corporate ladder, with House’s promotion to publisher coming in 2002 during Kann’s tenure after she ran The Journal’s international operations in the 1990s. Kann had been named publisher of The Journal in 1989 and chief executive of Dow Jones in 1991.