Stephen Emms and Tom Kihl co-edit a website, The Kentishtowner, that serves a north London district. They read the extracts about hyperlocal sites from the book I have been serialising, What do we mean by local? and thought their experience was altogether different.

"We believe we are doing something truly different to the models discussed in your series," wrote Stephen. So I'm delighted to carry an article by him extolling the virtues of that model...

We've been reading the "local newspapers' crisis" series with interest, particularly those on the limited successes of the hyperlocals. This is because our experience is refreshingly optimistic.

Our daily website, The Kentishtowner, is not a hobby. It's a genuinely new model, combining good writing with a rising monthly audience and revenue.

In May, we enjoyed nearly 40,000 page views with a very vocal core audience of around 15,000 regular readers – and actually made a profit.

It is an online magazine for north London, with its heart, as you might expect, in Kentish Town, a demographically and culturally varied area. It may have started as a weekly blog, but six months ago we decided to relaunch seriously as a daily publication.

We now have a pool of contributors and have made very encouraging progress with a growing list of sponsors and advertisers. We are dedicated to the project as a viable business, so much so that co-editor Tom Kihl and I moved into an office together in February where we run this site alongside our other media-based enterprises.

And, for what it matters, we are professional, not "citizen", journalists (ex DJ Magazine deputy editor and freelance Guardian contributor respectively).

There can be a tendency for sites that deal with narrow communities to mimic local newspapers with a few added digital bells and whistles.

Our modus operandi is hopefully more broad-reaching and glossy: rather than posting very few features a month, we publish 30-40 articles, with an emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment to appeal to our multicultural, diverse audience.

With our content we hope to strike a balance between light-hearted and worthiness; we leave news to existing titles. Pre-Twitter we all turned to local papers to access what was going on in our area, but now there are many exciting options – and we are simply one of those.

We like to cultivate a sense of belonging; and we know from feedback that readers enjoy seeing places they know or recognise, offering their own opinions, and hearing regularly from a trusted source.

Trusted sources are increasingly important when surrounded by the general noise on platforms like Twitter – especially those with a strong sense of voice (perhaps harder to achieve for a hyperlocal than you might expect).

So, we try to create a buzz, rather than report on the news. We strive to create content that will have at its core a local audience but appeal in general to discerning readers, wherever they live. And we want this content to be available to people on the move and out and about 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 on the go.

Raising revenue: local focus gives us the edge

This is a largely unexplored territory for generating revenue via location aware alerts, offers and searches, but having already built the kind of loyal, engaged hyperlocal audience that local businesses need to court to survive, we believe one that has strong potential.

So how have we created a revenue without a sales team? We hold regular meetings with key local businesses to secure advertising and we've also been approached by national companies and agencies, several of whom sponsor our weekly sections.

Our local focus gives us the edge for advertisers – pubs, restaurants, shops, clubs – over broader reaching city-wide websites, while our use of technology makes us a more attractive and dynamic proposition than traditional options like local cinema advertising.

Now we're starting to build a solid monthly revenue, a sustainable business model. We have a long way to go, but we are surprised by the monthly turnover to date. Sometimes we plug other projects we are working on; but like all our advertising, this is clearly marked and it highlights another way we are making a hyperlocal site "work" rather than simply exist.

And we have not forgotten about design. Too often hyperlocals are simply not visually stimulating. Just take a look at many examples for yourselves. We worked with a professional artist on the logo, include plentiful photography and a clear broadsheet-style layout (which we spent hours focussing on for the relaunch).

We are so serious about the business potential of The Kentishtowner that we have applied for a Nesta "destination local" grant to help us continue to improve, keep up with digital and mobile developments, and provide our readers with something that's vital.

We believe we are doing something truly different to the models discussed in the "crisis" series. Something optimistic – yet achievable. And probably more so in the centre of the capital than the heart of a rural community. But there we are: a hyperlocal that we believe is becoming viable.

Tomorrow, in the next extract from What do we mean by local?, I'll be carrying an abridged chapter by Paul Potts and Richard Peel about Jeremy Hunt's plan to introduce local TV