Part of the nonprofit Texas Tribune’s business model is built around events. Co-founder and CEO Evan Smith explains how that works.

The philosophical basis of this is that face-to-face – before blogging and all this stuff that we call the platform-agnostic world – real-time was the original platform. People actually got in a room and talked. Getting people in a room together and letting them talk about the big issues that matter is a form of journalism. And the experience of being in that conversation inspires them to take action.

We’re doing an ongoing series of events around Texas that will always been on the record, open to the public and at least for the foreseeable future, free. They’ll be supported by underwriting, corporate sponsorship and additional means of raising money. But no advertising, no exclusivity, no off-the-record.

There might be a good argument for advertiser-supported events but we believe that this is journalism.

This kind of big idea discussion is journalism and needs to be in front of a big audience.

We’ve been able to monetize it very nicely so far. We do a conversation series twice a month, once a month in the summer when people are off, three a month during the fall and weekly during the legislative session if it doesn’t kill us.

We have four presenting sponsors, each at $25,000 a year: AT&T, IBC Bank, NRG, Christus Health System. It’s roughly $1,000 a spot for them. We have 200 to 250 people at each event. We’ve done them with the speaker of the Texas House, the lieutenant governor, with the mayor of Houston, the chair of the Texas transportation system. We talk for a half an hour and then the audience gets to ask questions. It’s all videotaped and the podcast is available on our site.

Events can be journalism and still be earned income.