Introduction

The intersection of media management and emergency response is one of the most operationally demanding and consequential scenarios an event safety team will face. When a serious incident occurs at a live event — a medical mass casualty event, a structural collapse, a crowd crush, a severe weather emergency — the media’s response is immediate, the demand for information is intense, and the quality of the information that reaches the public through media channels in the first hours has real-world safety consequences. Inaccurate media reports of an ongoing incident can drive crowd behavior — movement toward or away from an incident, refusal to follow evacuation instructions, dangerous decision-making by unaffected audience members — that amplifies the harm the incident itself causes. Industry safety guidance addresses this challenge in Chapter 27, including specific guidance on the media staffing required to manage incident communications at major events.

The Press Office’s Role in Emergency Communications

The identifies the pre-event relationship between the event’s press office staff and key operational personnel — security, stewarding, local authority officers, police spokespersons, welfare organizers, and event film units — as a critical preparation for emergency communications. This relationship-building recommendation acknowledges a practical reality: in an emergency, communications decisions need to be made rapidly by people who already have working relationships with each other, not by strangers who must establish trust and communication protocols under pressure. The chief press officer’s introduction to these key personnel before the event creates the interpersonal connections that enable the rapid, coordinated information management that emergency communications require.

The’s guidance on major incident communications is direct: if a large-scale incident occurs, the event-related entities — organizer, press officer, commercial PR agencies — should anticipate that the lead government agency on site will step in and control the dissemination of all information to the press and media. This guidance reflects the legal and operational framework for emergency communications in most jurisdictions: law enforcement agencies typically have authority to designate a single public information officer as the official spokesperson during major incidents involving criminal investigation or public safety emergency, and the event’s commercial communications activities must be subordinated to this official information management structure when it is activated.

Event press officers must be briefed in advance on this protocol and prepared to support it. When a major incident triggers official information management by law enforcement or emergency management, the event’s press office transitions from the information source to an information coordination function — facilitating the flow of accurate information from the official spokesperson to media representatives, rather than issuing independent statements that could conflict with official communications. This transition requires both organizational preparedness (the press officer knows their role changes and accepts the authority of the official spokesperson) and operational capability (the press office infrastructure supports the official information flow).

Social Media and the Real-Time Information Environment

The’s media management guidance, written in 2013, identifies television, radio, print, and photography as the primary media types requiring management at live events. The decade since has seen social media become the dominant channel through which the public receives real-time information about events — including safety incidents — before traditional media reporting catches up. This shift has profound implications for event emergency communications, as social media reports of incidents typically emerge within minutes, often in the form of unverified, partial, or inaccurate accounts that circulate widely before official communications can respond.

Several documented incidents demonstrate the safety consequences of social media information dynamics at live events. At events where initial social media reports of a minor incident have been inaccurately described as a major emergency, the resulting panic has sometimes generated crowd movements more dangerous than the original incident. Conversely, at events where a serious incident has occurred, social media accounts that minimized or dismissed the emergency have contributed to delayed evacuation and help-seeking behavior. The event safety team’s emergency communications protocol must account for the social media information environment as a factor that will shape audience behavior — and must include active management of the social media information flow as a safety function, not merely a reputational one.

Active social media monitoring during an event — specifically monitoring for safety-relevant posts by audience members — provides the safety team with early warning of developing incidents before formal reporting reaches the command post. An audience member posting about smoke in a particular area of the site, or reporting a crowd crush at a stage entrance, may provide actionable intelligence to the safety team minutes before the condition would otherwise be identified through the monitoring and reporting chain. Integrating social media monitoring into the event’s situational awareness function — with a dedicated monitor who provides real-time social media intelligence to the unified command — is an emerging best practice for large events.

Conveying Entities: Multi-Party Emergency Communications Coordination

The recommends that in the event of a large-scale incident, the relevant parties — organizers, press officers, commercial PR agencies, local authority officers, police, and welfare organizers — convene together to determine what information should be communicated to the press and media, and how. This multi-party convening recommendation is effectively an application of the NIMS Unified Command principle to emergency public information management: rather than having multiple parties issue independent statements that may conflict, a unified information management group develops coordinated messaging that all parties support.

The Joint Information System (JIS) and Joint Information Center (JIC) models from FEMA’s NIMS framework provide the operational structure for this multi-party emergency communications coordination. The JIS establishes a system for coordinating public information activities across all incident management organizations; the JIC provides the physical location and staff resources for implementing coordinated public information operations during a major incident. For large events, establishing the equivalent of a JIC — a designated location and a defined convening process for the multi-party emergency communications group — before the event, so that the process is known and ready when needed, rather than improvised after an incident occurs, is consistent with the’s general principle of proactive planning over reactive response.

Media Communications During Ongoing Emergencies

Emergency communications during an ongoing incident at a live event face several specific challenges: information is incomplete and rapidly changing; official sources may not be able to confirm details that audience members are already sharing on social media; and the operational demands of the incident response compete for the attention of the personnel who have the authoritative information the press needs. Effective emergency media communications protocols address these challenges through several mechanisms.

First, pre-designated holding statements — brief factual statements acknowledging that an incident has occurred and that the event’s safety team is responding, without specific details that may not yet be confirmed — allow immediate media response before the full picture is known. A holding statement (“An incident has occurred at [area] and our safety team is responding. We will provide updates as information becomes available.”) is more effective than silence, which creates a vacuum that media fill with unverified information from other sources.

Second, regular update intervals — publicly committed by the press officer at the time of the first statement, and honored through the incident — provide media with a predictable information rhythm that reduces the pressure for constant ad hoc inquiry. Media representatives who know the next update will come in 15 minutes will generally wait for that update rather than seeking information from unauthorized sources. Third, consistent routing of all media inquiries through the designated press contact — enforced through briefings to all event operational staff — prevents media from obtaining inconsistent or unauthorized information from operational personnel who may provide accurate but uncoordinated accounts of what they personally observed.

Media Staffing for Emergency Communications

The’s staffing benchmark for media management — at least 10 people for a large three-day event with 50,000 or more capacity — should be evaluated against the emergency communications demand as well as the routine media management demand. In an emergency, the volume of media inquiries can increase by an order of magnitude from routine levels, and the complexity of the communications management task — coordinating with law enforcement, managing social media, issuing regular updates, monitoring for misinformation — substantially exceeds routine press office operations.

Emergency communications staffing plans should identify a designated emergency communications lead — separate from the routine press officer role — who is specifically responsible for emergency communications management and who is cleared to receive situational awareness briefings from the unified command. This individual should have training or experience in crisis communications, as the skills required for routine event press management and those required for major incident communications are substantially different. All media management staff should receive training on the emergency communications protocol as part of their pre-event briefing, so that the protocol is implemented consistently from the first moment of an incident.

Conclusion

Emergency media communications at live events require systematic preparation that goes beyond the routine press management planning that most event producers undertake. The’s guidance on pre-event relationship-building between press officers and operational personnel, the protocol for transitioning to government-controlled information management in major incidents, and the multi-party convening process for developing coordinated emergency messaging provides the framework. Supplemented by NIMS JIS/JIC principles for multi-agency information coordination, social media monitoring protocols, and emergency-specific communications staffing, this framework enables event press offices to function effectively as safety management resources during the incidents where their performance matters most.

References

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2018). Joint information system/joint information center. FEMA. https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/training/nims-training-courses

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2017). National incident management system (3rd ed.). FEMA. https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/nims

Reynolds, B., & Seeger, M. W. (2005). Crisis and emergency risk communication as an integrative model. Journal of Health Communication, 10(1), 43–55.