Kann blamed the slump on weak advertising at the Journal, which lost 8 percent of its ads in the first quarter and expects the slump to continue.

The advertising problems at the financial publishing giant seeped into the market, as well, as the stock fell 4.6 percent yesterday, to $35.46, off $1.72. Shares are off 24 percent in the last 12 months.

First-quarter profit fell to $8.2 million, or 10 cents a diluted share, from $17.8 million, or 22 cents a share, a year earlier.

Quarterly revenue rose to $412.1 million, up 2.6 percent from a year earlier, despite an 8 percent decline in ad linage at the U.S. edition of the newspaper.

Although Kann bought some peace in recent months by siding with the founding Bancroft family in a boardroom showdown over family control of the company stock, Kann's performance in the past several years may not impress investors much longer, analysts say.

"When you perform so poorly for such a long time, investors are going to find fault with the generals," said analyst Seth Feinseth of Matrix USA.

He said Kann's management team — including Kann's wife, Karen House, publisher of the Journal — "have not been creating shareholder value."

Kann expects to pick up more consumer advertising with a new weekend edition of the Journal being launched in September at a cost of more than $40 million.

Feinseth said the company "doesn't earn enough to cover the cost of the capital they use — its average profit is 4.2 percent but the annual cost of its capital is 8.4 percent.

"They're having a much harder time than other media," he said. "Its growth rate is lower than other media in the sector — at 5.4 percent vs. a 7.7 growth rate for the sector.

"They're simply losing market share to other media. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore," said Feinseth.

Kann is hoping that the company's long-range growth also comes in online publishing, which has profit margins at least 20-fold higher than print.

The Wall Street Journal Online is signing up thousands of new subscribers, up 5.2 percent for the quarter, to a total of 731,000.

But some readers say they're just switching from buying the more expensive print editions of the Journal and Barron's to the lower-priced online versions.

One market watcher said, "Instead of paying about $356 a year for the print version of the Journal and Barron's, I'm gettng it online for $84 a year."

Some investors say the jury is still out on his $538 million gamble on buying free financial Web site MarketWatch last year.

But in the first quarter, MarketWatch helped drive up first-quarter electronic publishing revenue by 35.7 percent to $117.2 million in the quarter.

Meantime, Kann is still trying to live down his other disastrous acquisition of Bridge Information Systems in the 1990s, which the company dumped in 1998 after taking a bath of up to $500 million — and is still paying off the loss throughout 2006.

Kann was on the ropes over that deal but won his way back into the Bancroft family's graces by agreeing to a complex boardroom deal earlier this year to let the Bancrofts gain more control even if they sell off their super-voting shares.

The final vote on the Bancroft control issue comes at Wednesday's annual meting. The board is encouraging shareholders to vote for the Bancroft control issue, but some shareholders are expected to raise complaints over the company's dismal perfomance in the past few years.