As far as the media is concerned, we have definitely witnessed "the end of Wall Street as we know it." (The Wall Street Journal is so sure of this, in fact, that it just published a 224-page "guide" to the end-of-Wall-Street phenomenon, complete with tips for the Average Joe on "how to survive it." Hint: pay down debt; put your money in a "safe" institution; diversify. What else is new?) But if Wall Street, or at least the media's notion of Wall Street -- Gordon Gekko, big swinging you-know-whats, fleets of Ferraris -- is really over, what's going to take its place?

Well, that's what the media is now starting to contemplate, divested of a few of the usual stereotypes. And -- this is a shock -- it's a real struggle.

Consider a recent piece on Fortune online, headlined "A personal touch back to Wall Street." According to this story, "As the global financial supermarkets that have dominated investment banking over the past few years go through wrenching changes, the Street is harkening back to one of its favorite old saws: The 'relationship banker' is the best kind of banker." This creature of antiquity "is a more patrician and less pushy version of the league table-obsessed, cheap money-pushing fee factory sort who ascended in the early 2000s," Fortune tells us. "But it's not a total throwback either." No martini lunches and country clubs.

To prove its point, the story wheels out Francois Maisonrouge, a banker at Evercore Partners Inc., which advised Wyeth on its $68 billion merger with Pfizer Inc. announced last month. It seems Maisonrouge has known Wyeth CEO Bernard Poussot since the early 1990s, when he was at Credit Suisse Group and Poussot was Wyeth's CFO. "Though they never did a deal together, they worked well together," Fortune explains. "The financier taught the pharmaceutical executive about finance, and vice-versa."

And when Poussot finally did a deal, he called on Maisonrouge, who worked on the transaction for nine intense months. "That's the kind of attention you get in a relationship like ours," Maisonrouge boasts to Fortune.

It's a nice little dealmaking anecdote. And the kind of who-knows-who, behind-the-scenes detail The Deal has been trafficking in since its inception in the relationship-obsessed column we call Deal Diary. But for Fortune, the Maisonrouge-Poussot connection is "an example of how Wall Street is going back to the old ways." When it comes to winning deal mandates, it explains, relationships are once again trumping the ability to finance a transaction.

There's a bit of truth to that statement, of course. With big bank balance sheets in disarray and an increasing number of big-name dealmakers signing on with boutiques like Evercore, pure M&A advisory shops do seem to be ascendant. But did relationship banking ever really disappear? A quick read of several years worth of Deal Diary, plus the fact that pre-meltdown boutiques had proliferated, would argue no. And then there's the reality that at least for buyers, financing has never been as key as it is today.

Just look at the other side of the Wyeth deal. Pfizer's adviser lineup consists of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman, Sachs & Co., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Capital -- the same banks that are providing a one-year bridge loan to the company. Left out in the cold is Lazard, which has been advising Pfizer "for the greater part of 30 years," thanks largely to Lazard alum Felix Rohatyn, who sat on Pfizer's board for 26 years.

That tidbit comes from a story a few weeks ago on -- where else? -- Fortune's website. In that piece, Lazard's absence from the Pfizer deal was used to illustrate "a first -- and a bit surprising -- glimpse of what the new Wall Street pecking order may look like." In this story's scenario, banks that have received money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and can therefore finance deals, or at least deals with a cash component, are well-positioned to beat out Lazard (and Evercore) for advisory mandates, despite their relationships. "The new paradigm might just favor the firms the government helped save," this piece concludes. "Maybe this is what former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had in mind all along."

So here's Fortune, in the space of mere weeks, using different aspects of the same deal to prove warring theories about what a new Wall Street might look like. Clearly, it doesn't have a clue.

Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.