Pull back the curtain. The public is watching

The media isn’t your adversary. They’re your most direct connection to the people you serve.

When a wildfire burned through an area north of Two Harbors in May 2025, destroying homes and buildings and forcing hundreds of evacuations, one person on the front lines was doing something that doesn’t always happen: he was pulling back the curtain.

Fireline EMT Kael Keilwitz used his time between calls to photograph the work happening around him. He snapped shots of crews cutting lines, engines staged along Highway 61, firefighters doing the hard, unglamorous, relentless work of protecting what they could. The Minnesota Incident Command System public information officers disseminated his photos during the firefighting effort, giving homeowners a look at what was actually happening to their properties and how complicated it really is to fight a wildfire.

That’s crisis communications done right. And it’s a reminder that most public safety agencies are sitting on a powerful communications tool they rarely use.

Key takeaways

• The media is your most direct connector to the public. When you talk to reporters, you’re talking to the people you serve. That’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity.
• Visual content stops the scroll. A great photo or video communicates what a news release never can — that real people are doing real work, right now, on behalf of the community.
• What feels ordinary to you is extraordinary to the public. The inside of a fire truck. A drip torch. A duty belt. A wildland firefighter working in the black. They never get to see this. Show them.
• Providing photos and videos to the media builds relationships. When you make a reporter’s job easier with quality visuals, they remember it and so does their audience.
• Transparency builds trust before, during and after a crisis. Homeowners watching their neighborhood burn from an evacuation shelter don’t need spin. They need to see that someone is out there fighting for them.

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Firefighters from across Minnesota gather for a morning briefing during the Stewart Trail wildfire response. This is the work the public rarely gets to see.

The media isn’t your enemy

I’ve heard it so many times over the years. From law enforcement, firefighters, emergency managers, government officials. “We don’t trust the media.” “They always get it wrong.” “They’re just looking for a story.”

Sometimes that’s true. But here’s what’s also true: when something goes wrong in your community, the media is going to cover it. The question isn’t whether the story gets told. It’s whether you have any say in how it gets told.

And the most powerful way to shape that story isn’t through a carefully worded statement. Is that a piece of the puzzle? Absolutely. But images and videos are just as powerful and important.

Your car is just your car

I always tell public safety professionals: your patrol car is just your car. You sit in it every day. The tools on your duty belt feel routine. The inside of a fire truck is just the inside of a fire truck.

But the public? They never see any of it. They don’t know what a drip torch is or what it means to work in the black. They can’t picture what it actually looks like to cut a containment line in the middle of the night while a fire moves toward homes. They’ve never seen up close the tools an officer uses or what it costs to keep a community safe.

Show them.

Not for credit. Not for PR. Because they deserve to understand the work being done on their behalf. And because understanding builds trust, which is often the most important tool you have when things go wrong and you need the public on your side.

What Keilwitz did right

Keilwitz wasn’t a PIO. He wasn’t a communications professional. He was a fireline EMT who had a camera and understood something that a lot of experienced communicators miss: people need to see the work.

“Being reassured that there is constant work being done every day on this fire by very well trained, very qualified people and knowing that there are people out there running towards the fire instead of being evacuated away from it,” he said.

That’s what his photos communicated. Not a talking point. Not a statistic. A feeling. And feelings are what move people to trust, to stay calm, to cooperate and to remember that the people protecting them are human beings doing something hard.

The MNICS PIOs who distributed those photos understood something important: giving the media and the public quality imagery from the scene doesn’t compromise the response. It strengthens it.

The practical case for visual transparency

Here’s what visual transparency does during a crisis:

It fills the information vacuum before rumors do. When people can’t see what’s happening, they imagine the worst. Images replace fear with facts.

It gives media outlets something to work with. A reporter with good imagery tells a better, more accurate story. A reporter without imagery goes looking and sometimes finds the wrong thing or gets hurt.

It humanizes the people doing the work. Firefighters become neighbors. Officers become protectors. Emergency managers become problem-solvers. That matters when the community needs to trust that the right people are in charge.

And after the crisis? Those images become part of the record. They document the work, honor the people who did it and remind communities what it costs to keep them safe.