AFP raids Four Corners whistleblower’s home. The Australian Federal Police has raided the home of a whistleblower who’s been speaking to Four Corners and Fairfax about alleged abuse of power by the Australian Tax Office. Debt collector Richard Boyle told the ABC his Adelaide home was raided by four AFP officers, along with an ATO investigator yesterday. The warrant specifically referred to Four Corners and Fairfax reporter Adele Ferguson.

Courier-Mail’s dodgy prawn story. The Courier-Mail has been found in breach of the Australian Press Council standards in a story about a Thai restaurant. Published in April last year, the story implied the restaurant had taken advantage of a ban on importing prawns by inflating its prices. Thai Terrace complained about the article after it was only contacted by the paper through an online booking form request, but without the journalist identifying herself. The press council found the story was misleading, was not fair and balanced, and didn’t give a fair right of reply or appropriate remedial action.

Viewers tune in to opening ceremony. The broadcast for the Opening Ceremony of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games boasted more than 2.74 million national viewers, with 2.01 million in the metros and 736,000 in the regions. The countdown to the opening averaged 1.2 million nationally and the highlights averaged 1.48 million.

This belies the cynical attempts by News Corp and Fairfax Media to downplay the Games importance amid a media accreditation boycott. A column in the Fairfax media today by Age columnist and lawyer Duncan Fine bagged the Games as having “failed to raise much interest precisely because they are shrouded in corporate speak and heavy-handed bureaucracy.”

“It’s this strict and unthinking pedantry at what should be a harmonious celebration of sport that led in December last year to both Fairfax Media and News Corp boycotting the Games. All that will mean is less coverage for the athletes and greater disengagement for us, the people,” he said.

There is obviously a lot more interest in the Games than first thought, and a big test will be in the second week after the swimming is over which Australia is expected to dominate.  — Glenn Dyer

Financial Times sausage fest. The Financial Times is possibly the “manliest” of all newspapers, with just 20% of its subscribers being women. But the paper’s first head of engagement Renee Kaplan is trying to turn it around, telling Nieman Lab she’s been running experiments to try to change the paper from something thought of as for ageing, white men. One of those is a new team reporting on professional services — content they’ve found women engage in on their sites:

It’s a gamble: newsrooms aren’t in a resource-growth moment right now! To be reallocating and creating new resources for a specific vertical is pretty radical. The engagement of women with this content wasn’t the only reason to do it. But it was a big reason.

Glenn Dyer TV Ratings. Seven at last had some good news with the Commonwealth Games topping expectations and gathering three of the top five spots nationally. Much better than Seven had been hoping for and, while partly explained by school holidays, the high figures were a tribute to the stepped up promotion over the past six months. 

Nothing else mattered, and as such, the ABC should really repeat last night’s episode of Mad As Hell, which was one of the best ever — it got 656,000 nationally and deserved double that, if only for his very neat skewering of Bill Shorten, again. But the Games sucked viewers away from every program from 7pm onwards — the ratings for A Current Affair, The Project, the ABC News, then 7.30 sank sharply as viewers moved to Seven and stayed there. And of course these figures do not include viewers in clubs, pubs and offices, or streaming. 

In the regions the Opening Ceremony topped the night with 736,000, followed by the daytime countdown with 615,000. Seven News was third with 522,000, then Seven News/TT with 478,000 and the highlights with 381,000 was fifth. — Read the rest on the Crikey website.