The Windsor Star and Useful Reporting ?

This past Saturday July 25/09, on the front pages of our very own Windsor Star, we were treated to banner headlines which read:

On GM board? You get $200,000 and a car

The story is a critique on pay and perks for new members of the General Motors (GM) Board of Directors. The account, written by super snooper Grace Macaluso, is typical Macaluso. She immediately validates the spitball she wants to throw at the new GM Board by quoting "critics" of the GM policy on pay and perks. This lets her say what she wants, but gets her off the hook, as she can attribute the comments to "critics".

Wow, and you have to go to journalism school to learn this?

While I have to admit the pay for a GM Board member sounds pretty good, it is a multi-billion dollar company, there are great personal, financial, and reputational risks to sitting on Boards these days, and it is not the cakewalk some would have you believe. Board members are expected to bring significant knowledge, experience, and leadership to their duties.

But back to Macaluso, who, I am sure, is a corporate governance expert, along with being a key business writer at the Windsor Star. She was able to track down federal NDP opposition Member of Parliament Joe Comartin, who represents Windsor-Tecumseh. I guess Ontario finance minister Dwight Duncan was not available. Anyway, Mr. Comartin says "this is a part-time job" and "there is no way the average citizen would say that is fair compensation". I am sure if Mr. Comartin or super snooper Macaulso, for that matter, were to ask voters in Windsor-Tecumseh their opinions on pay and perks for federal M.P.'s, some might say it is a little excessive. I definitely would not say that, but some "critics" might.

On a personal level, I would like to add that Mr. Comartin is a very nice person and has always been polite to me. On a political level, he is definitely hard left: the perfect "critic" to validate Macaluso's point.

This page 1 story is long and carried over to page 11. Way down on page 11, if you read that far, we finally hear from Joseph D'Cruz, a professor at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, who says that the GM compensation was reasonable within the corporate boardrooms of North America.

I guess this is another technique they teach you at journalism school: if you have to give two sides to a story, make sure the opinion you want to least accentuate is way down the story line and on a different page.

As my readers will know, I am a graduate of the Corporate Governance College, which is at the Rotman School of Management, and I have experience on private sector and not-for-profit Boards. One of my current colleagues was recently approached to sit on the Bank of Montreal Board. This is big time. He turned the invitation down. The time commitment needed too great, the reputational risk too significant, with a compensation level not matching either.

The truth of the matter is--and we did not get this from the Macaluso story--attracting good board leadership is very difficult. The Macaluso story would have been more valuable if we had been given a real sense of the experience and leadership qualities of the new GM Board, instead of a cheap story on pay and perks. After all, some "critics" think Windsor Star reporters are overpaid.