Now let’s get this straight.

I am not the voice of the common man. However, I am the future of journalism.

These two things are kind of connected as I’ve recently been covering the Cadbury takeover story for the local blog that I edit.

Local blogs focused on middle class suburbs like Bournville tend to be genteel affairs.

Our biggest story to date had been our shock revelation that the local Tesco would not be open on Christmas Day.

That increased ten-fold the amount of traffic we usually get.

Part of the reason for that was because a Google search for “Tesco”, “Christmas” and “opening hours” seemed to place us on the first page of results.

When Kraft made their move for Cadbury a couple of weeks back our blog witnessed a similar spike in visitors.

This time if you googled Cadbury and Bournville we appeared second only to Cadbury’s official website.

Clearly some of that googling was coming from journalists looking to understand the impact of the takeover as we took queries from US and European media outlets seeking our “grassroots” view.

Truth is we’re a lot less grassroots than you think round here but journalists are always happy to stick with the story they want to hear rather than the one they’re told which is why it’s important that our blog keeps a cool head.

So far we’ve posted over a dozen stories about the takeover along with many videos and photographs.

We’ve avoided editorialising but this once genteel blog now finds itself covering the views of residents, workers and union officials – it doesn’t take much to work out where our heart is.

So why am I declaring myself the future of journalism?

Well I’m not quite, but for a blog that only began last summer it hasn’t taken that long for us to be mixing it with the big boys up there on Google’s front page.

I think the fancy term is search engine optimisation but in simple terms it’s patience and focus and it’s those two things that will shape local journalism in the years to come.

* Dave Harte is award leader for the MA Social Media at Birmingham City University (as well as current editor of www.bournvillevillage.com)