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Photojournalist Becomes Lawyer to Help His Fellow Photogs Fight Legal Battles
< < Back to photojournalist-becomes-lawyer-to-help-his-fellow-photogs-fight-legal-battlesMickey Osterreicher started his career as an award-winning photojournalist. Now, he is a formidable lawyer who fights for the rights of photographers and for the First Amendment.
Osterreicher is the current general counsel to the National Press Photographers Association and a media lawyer with the law firm of Barclay Damon LLP.
He recently was in Athens at the Schuneman Symposium for Photojournalism and New Media talking about drones and drone photography. He is fighting against over regulation of drones and is promoting their use by photographers.
He is combating governmental restrictions.
Osterreicher became a photojournalist after graduating in 1973 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His work was displayed widely in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today along with ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, Good Morning American, NBC Nightly News and ESPN.
In 1998, after 25 years in journalism, he got his law degree from the University of Buffalo Law School and started advocating for photographic issues, photographers and other journalists.
Currently, he is actively involved in cameras in the courtroom issues, federal shield law matters, overall media access, public photography, drones and fighting anti-paparazzi statutes.
He agrees that different age groups have different expectations of privacy and that young people do not have the same sense or need for privacy as their parents and grandparents.
He is a strong believer that any person in public should have no expectation of privacy and should be open for photographers to capture their images.
For his work as both a photojournalist and an attorney representing media, Osterreicher became a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalism in 2015 – the organization’s highest honor.