Even its logo was a narrative. This weekend’s Nieman conference (full name: “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times: Nieman Narrative Conference 2009”) represented itself in its promotional materials through an image rendered in text. And the message of said image wasn’t subtle: the awkward interplay between the solidity (the stolidity, even) of “telling true stories” and the relative chaos of the rumbled, jumbled “turbulent times” suggests the contentious relationship between journalism and its current cultural moment. Narrative journalism is rooted in ground that is anything but solid. And under threat from our T-U-R-B-U-L-E-N-T TIMES.

The textual imagery at play here—the simultaneous polarity and connectivity between our stories and our times—makes an apt analogy for a conference that was both a receptacle for and an antidote to the tension between the two. The conference’s decidedly upbeat tone seemed to suggest, alternately, genuine optimism (emergent models of journalism offer new opportunities “to delight” audiences, “to make them love us in ways that our old models prevented,” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab) and the reflexive self-defensiveness of a beleaguered institution. “The business model is broken. You are not broken,” the Pulitzer-winning Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz declared in the conference’s opening keynote.

One wonders whether a similar assurance was offered at “Conducting Yourself: Locomotive Operators Convention 1909.”

The conference’s from-adversity-to-the-stars sensibility emphasized the cultivation of craft itself as an adversity-tackling vehicle. Narrative is journalism’s future as well as its past, Schultz told the crowd, because it provides context and background and insight—the details, large and small, that foster empathy. “People will always want and need to know,” she said, “that they’re not alone in their suffering and hope.”

It’s hard to argue with that; one principle that nearly everyone who cares about journalism—from the most ardent Webvangelist to the most hardboiled city editor—agrees on is that narrative is key to good journalism. Compelling, evocative storytelling will endure. For the simple reason that we need it to.

The question provoked this weekend is how narrative will continue to inform us and our information itself. How storytelling will evolve. How narrative authority will expand or (could Foucault have been right?) contract under the influence of a medium that is toppling our assumptions about what an author actually is.

Which is a roundabout way (sorry—I missed the “Structuring Your Story” panel, alas, which I’m sure advised its attendees of the virtues of both brevity and precision) of saying that the Nieman conference left me—as, really, the best of such gatherings do—with more questions than answers. (I should interrupt myself here to clarify that the conference’s embarrassment of intellectual riches, and its relatively short time span, meant that several—usually five or six— breakout panels took place during a single time slot, forcing participants to choose one among them; my experience was, in that sense, limited. So have your grains of salt at the ready: my sense of the conference overall—and my assessment of it—is highly subjective.) The basic question is the same one that so many in journalism are grappling with right now: basically, whence narrative? Are the standards for good narrative transcendent and therefore inviolable, or do they—must they—evolve with the times? Is good narrative a goal in itself, or is it a means to the more nebulous journalistic ends of informing, engaging, connecting, etc.?

This weekend’s panels, in regards to that last one, were split. Among the expected shout-outs to “the power of the story” and the like—celebrations of narrative that verged, at times, on fetishizing it (narrative compels! narrative informs! narrative is The Whole Damn Point!)—were treatments of new forms of storytelling on the Web: leveraging its power to employ cinematic techniques to still photography; using its immense archival capabilities to record the lives of ordinary people; employing the people formerly known as “audience” to inform and shape and tell stories.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.