Elsewhere in a discussion on the dearth of municipal blogging, some of us toss around the fact that bloggers usually don’t do the kind of investigative legwork that reporters do, and can’t break stories.

Meet a vital exception: Paul Willcocks and his blog, Paying attention.

He’s independent (I’ve disagreed with almost exactly half of what he’s written about the BCTF’s struggles with the provincial government), a bang-up writer, and a reporter who has paid unflinching attention to the growing outrage over the B.C. government’s failure to investigate children’s deaths while in provincial care.

From his latest post, here’s why this is so much more than just another political scandal:

One phone conversation with Dayna Humphrey demolishes all the government’s evasions on child death reviews.

Humphrey’s son died more than two years ago, weeks after he was placed in a Surrey foster home….

Humphrey tried for almost a year to get answers. “I’ve been slapped down at every step,” she says, in a quiet voice. Finally, she gave up.

Then came the admission that files on 713 child deaths had been forgotten in a Victoria warehouse.

“I woke up at 6:30, like I do every morning, to get ready for work and turned on the news and there it was, right in front of me,” says Humphrey. “I was devastated. I’m angry. I’m hurt.”

She wondered whether proper reviews into those deaths would have yielded lessons that would have saved Brandon’s life.

Paul was covering this story when most of BC’s media let it drop. He’s a credit to his profession.