What with the Cloudstrike outage and Australia’s Nine Publishing staff’s Olympic strike, it’s been an instructive few days.

With Cloudstrike, it struck me that too few people may know how to reload their systems, now it’s all done for them online.

And remember when newspapers had full systems redundancy in another block on the other side of town?

Yes, I know – and before someone says ‘Remember when there were newspapers…’ – how many people in management these days have a background in newsmedia, and an ability to do the jobs involved? A reminder of the days when I used to go along to a regional newspaper proprietors’ association meeting until the name was changed to “publishers’” because they were so few of the former left.

Not before we’d all shared training and experience to make sure that we could set type – when it was a thing – and print papers when the industrial situation required.

On the Nine issues, Mumbrella quoted media union the MEAA’s post that “Paul Kelly, Tony Armstrong, Shaun Micallef, and numerous other high-profile names” – but didn’t say which Paul Kelly (we know a few, some at least of whom certainly fit the description) – had “thrown their names behind the striking Nine journalists,” posting a video on Monday morning in which said “names” called on Nine to “reconsider the numerous pressure points” that preceded the walkout.

Perhaps the union should do the same.

Yes, accepting the invitation to carry the Olympic torch – that presumably came with Nine’s multimillion-dollar broadcast deal – wasn’t the most sensitive thing chief executive Mike Sneesby could have done. It would have been a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, but nonetheless, one he could have passed on to someone else.

No, calling publishing colleagues out when you think you’ve got the boss over a barrel wasn’t the smartest thing union leaders could have done either, and hasn’t left anyone looking (or feeling) good.

Interesting today to see James Madden taking sides in The Australian, not – as normal – against Sneesby and Nine, but against the journalists accused of a move That “reeks of entitlement, selfishness and an utter disregard for the people who are the only reason they have jobs.

“The decision by Nine’s publishing division to go on strike during the first five days of the Paris Olympics is one of the most egregious acts of industrial self-sabotage since the turn of the century,” he wrote.

Did the papers come out anyway? Yes of course. They are, after all, printed by a rival publisher.