North London Food & Culture

Why It Matters: Hyperlocal Media, Kentish Town and beyond


Kentish Town Zabludowicz Gallery

As loyal readers will have witnessed, The Kentishtowner – north London’s only daily magazine – continues to develop at a phenomenal rate. This matters. Not just to us, and our talented contributors, advertisers and savvy Londoners, but because it points towards something genuinely new and positive going on. Or at least we hope it does.

With traditional media models from newspapers to record labels challenged by the digital revolution, hyperlocal media –which simply means that specifically aimed at a geographically-defined area – might well emerge as the great success story of this disruptive era. But it’s still very early days.


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There can be a tendency for sites that deal with narrow communities to mimic local newspapers with a few added digital bells and whistles, but that isn’t ever what we’ve tried to do here. We strive to create content that will have at its core a local audience but appeal in general to discerning readers. And we want this content to be available to people on the move and in their environment.

So therefore GPS, maps and real time interactions with local businesses are increasingly important. As a ‘hyperlocal’ site we should be making use of the devices, such as mobiles and tablets, which define how we use and consume our news, information and features.

And that’s where our recent application to innovations charity NESTA’s ‘Destination Local’ grant comes in. We have applied for this to help us continue to improve The Kentishtowner, keep up with digital developments, and provide our readers with something that’s vital. We know from all your feedback that there is an appetite for quality editorial and digital services from a trusted local source.

For the application, we had to send both a pitch and 2 minute video. Here’s the latter, publicly available on youtube. Eeeeek. Be kind as we had no budget for the filming (and yes, the mystique is over: we are in it).

The results are out at the end of June so we’ll keep you posted. Finally, we hope you – our tens of thousands of readers – are behind us. As always we welcome your input so do let us know if or how you can help, in whatever way possible. Be a part of it: go on.

Words: Tom Kihl and Stephen Emms

Why It Matters comes in association with Discount Insurance, whose big boss bloke Steve lives in NW5, so he’s offering Kentishtowner readers a £10 M&S voucher with every new policy. Which seems like quite a nice deal to us.


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About Kentishtowner

The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.