Lots of good in latest issue of Portfolio

Dealbreaker.com’s John Carney writes Thursday that despite all of the piling on in criticizing new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio, there’s a lot of good stuff in the latest issue.

Carney wrote, “A bit of distortion seems to have crept into the coverage of Portfolio. It’s not all darkness and gloom between those covers. There are bright spots. Sophia Banay catches Ted Turner overpromising his charitable donations and underperforming, and then goes a step further and points out that it is very hard to measure any tangible benefits from many of the enormous donations we’ve seen in recent years. John Cassidy’s economics column on China’s debt securities holdings is very useful for thinking about where the subprime mortgage damage might be felt—Ni Hoa Ma, Bank of China? And Kurt Eichenwald’s investigative report more than makes up for the Tom Wolfe piece on Hedge Funds: it is brilliant, well-written, deeply researched and exactly the sort of long form journalism we’d hoped for from the new magazine.

“The website has its strengths as well. Felix Salmon is a brilliant economics writer, who understands macro and micro economics better than almost any other working journalist we could name. He’s humble enough to admit that he is not as well trained in the more technical art and science of finance but he’s clearly learning. His work on the dark holes in which collateralized debt obligations trade and get valued prefigured much of the credit crunch we’re now seeing. And he gets an important part of blogging—updating frequently and commenting on the main stories of the day.

“Portfolio might not have bloomed into a magnificent flower yet but it’s clearly starting to bud. And that’s all we can really ask of a two-issue old magazine. Sure, it’s top editor has held the job for something like two years. But, as a private equity guy we once worked for used to say, ‘Business is like sex. There’s thinking about it and doing it. Actually getting it done is harder, but when done right, a lot more satisfying.’ Portfolio has just started actually doing it. We’re not willing to give it the dead fish reputation quite yet.”

Read more here.Â