The Wall Street Journal is to part company with its advertising agency of four years Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group.
The agency won the account, which included corporate branding and the newspaper's direct mail circulation marketing account, at the tail end of 1998 following a pitch against J Walter Thompson, New York and TBWA\Chiat Day, Playa del Rey.
Prior to that, the business, which is estimated to have been worth $23m (£14m), had been handled by Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, Boston.
According to a Dow Jones spokesman, the company now plans to focus on trade campaigns, which will be produced in-house.
The account move does not affect the online edition of the 113-year-old newspaper, which will continue to work with the independent US creative agency Trahan, Burden & Charles, which has offices in Baltimore, New York, Washington DC and Reno, Nevada.
It is unclear if the move will affect The Wall Street Journal's advertising account in Europe, which is held by the London office of Scholz & Friends. The agency was appointed to handle the then £6m work in June 2001.
Last week, it was reported that competition from The Financial Times in the US has forced owners Dow Jones to consider extending its flagship business title to a six-day-a-week publication, by adding a new Saturday edition.
The Wall Street Journal cut as many as 31 jobs last year, as part of Dow Jones's ongoing efforts to cut costs, amounting to 5% of the paper's staff. The cuts came as the financial news group continued to suffer in the face of the advertising downturn, which has hit the financial sector particularly hard.
In November, Dow Jones raised its fourth-quarter earnings forecast, but said that it saw no sustainable recovery in the advertising market at The Wall Street Journal.
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