The opening plenary session of the recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference had a title that was chilling enough to offset (with the help of some powerful Texas air conditioning) the steamy, summery weather that greeted attendees in Austin:

"Is Journalism – Environmental or Otherwise – A Dying Idea?"

For anyone who might have thought that was perhaps a little sensationalistic, the panel blurb in the agenda booklet recited a litany of woes that persuasively underscored the decision to kick off the conference with a high-profile discussion of such a doom-laden question.

For many, this list doubtlessly captured the depressive journalistic zeitgeist of recent months:

"Commentators take secret payments to plug administration programs. Government agencies produce fake news reports. Basic information gets labeled 'secret' and much of the public applauds. At the same time, readers flee newspapers and viewers shun network news, prompting newsrooms to slash budgets and staffs as well as space and time for news. Meanwhile, as momentous environmental decisions seem to hardly make a ripple in the public consciousness, bloggers are able to bring down the mightiest media icons for sins real or imagined."

Just a few weeks before the SEJ meeting, however, something dramatic happened that tended to lessen the sense of pessimism that practically oozed from that outline of the plenary panel's topic.

Journalists – most visibly, some famous figures in the world of television news – reported the manifold shortcomings of the government response to Hurricane Katrina and the resulting tragedy of New Orleans with uncommon aggressiveness and emotion.

Journalistic backbones were much in evidence in the questioning of government officials. Anger, indignation and even tears replaced the usual professional dispassion and detachment.

The plenary subject had been chosen and the panelists invited well in advance of the hurricane, of course.

But nimbly updating the plenary program to account for Katrina, conference organizers added a montage of video clips, displaying highlights of the hard-edged coverage. They also added an extra panelist, Mark Schleifstein, whose reporting for the New Orleans Times-Picayune had famously detailed his city's growing vulnerability to hurricane-caused devastation.

Both additions essentially inserted an unspoken answer after the question in the plenary title: Is journalism a dying idea? Well, maybe not.

Just a day before the conference convened, Editor & Publisher reported that Gallup's annual governance survey had found, post-Katrina, that the number of people expressing trust in the press was up significantly, though still a little lower than in recent years.

It was good enough news for the newspaper trade publication to lead its story this way: "Widely hailed for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the American news media appears to be regaining the trust of the American people."

So which one is it? Is journalism dying? Is it just on a significant, disaster-fueled rebound? Or is it on a temporary rebound that isn't likely to stop the dying process?

It's an extremely complicated picture, made all the muddier by the overlapping trends of media corporations' cutbacks and the rise of new technologies that provide new outlets for journalistic and quasi-journalistic expression, particularly on the internet.

One key debate in the SEJ plenary discussion, exemplified in exchanges between panelists Merrill Brown and Jay Harris, addressed a dilemma facing many serious journalists because of this situation – whether it's best to continue trying to do good journalism in the context of traditional news outlets, such as newspapers, or to venture onto the internet in new, entrepreneurial ways.

(Brown, a new media journalist and consultant, is national coordinator of a five-university project to help revitalize journalism education. Harris, former publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, is a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and director of its Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy.)

Katrina (and Hurricane Rita, which struck the Gulf Coast a few weeks later) do appear to have contributed to a more aggressive approach in some journalistic quarters. They also highlighted the importance of good coverage of environmental matters, and illuminated the multiple ways environmental issues connect with other important concerns.

If there is a genuine resurgence of interest in environmental journalism because of the hurricanes, it won't be the first time a disaster fueled environmental awareness and spurred greater interest in environmental reporting.

Industrial accidents at Chernobyl and Bhopal did it. So did the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But as most environmental journalists are painfully aware, interest in their beat waxes and wanes over the years, partly in tune with such catastrophic events.

Generalizations about "the media" are always dangerous, but journalistic aggressiveness seems to be a cyclical thing, too, at least in certain definable precincts like the one made up of national news organizations. If that is the case, then any increase that occurs because of the Katrina experience shouldn't necessarily be expected to endure for long.

In the 70s, for instance, it seemed to some that a pair of Washington Post reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had ushered in a new era of tough investigative reporting with their Watergate reporting. Toward the end of the 1980s (and of the 1981-89 Reagan administration), however, author Mark Hertsgaard published a book whose title summed up his critique of the news media's attention to the federal government – "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency."

Buttressing his argument, Hertsgaard quoted none other than Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Post who oversaw Woodward and Bernstein's work, acknowledging what he called a journalistic "return to deference" in the Reagan years.

The book also quoted David Gergen, the political commentator who was adviser to four presidents, including Ronald Reagan: "There is no question in my mind there was more willingness to give Reagan the benefit of the doubt than there was [for] Carter or Ford."

It may be that a similar "deference" toward the current Bush administration by some in the news media, perhaps emanating partly from the national emergency of 9/11, has finally cracked under the combined weight of Iraq, Katrina and other influences.

(Of course, a case can also be made that there's actually more journalistic aggressiveness than ever, multiplying with the proliferation of blogs and other feisty new media outlets, but that the sheer number and obscurity of those voices dilutes the impact. Whether the commentary that dominates much of the blogosphere is a substitute for incisive, in-depth reporting, carried out by reporters with the resources of news organizations behind them, is, of course, another matter altogether.)

Whether journalism, environmental or otherwise, is a dying enterprise, or simply a rapidly changing enterprise, may be unanswerable at the moment.

For those interested in seeing journalism survive, in a form that bears close resemblance to its sometime glory as an informing, investigating, explaining, questioning part of democracy, there were words of encouragement at another SEJ conference session from the broadcast journalist Bill Moyers, who delivered a speech and then answered questions.

"The Gilded Age" of the 19th century "became the golden age of muckraking journalism," he reminded his audience, adding that "a lot is riding on what you do."

Answering another question, Moyers offered his own view of journalism's proper role, which doesn't necessarily confine its practice to media forms of old: "The main purpose of journalism is to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth."