The condos at 2520 Robinhood are owned and operated by very nice people

By Alex Wukman

As Free Press Houston previously reported the owners of the 2520 Robin Hood Condominiums are involved in a lawsuit with Houston real estate blog Swamplot. The lawsuit springs from two comments posted May 2 to a Swamplot story that threatened violence against the residents and homeowner’s association who have been involved in long-running legal battles with Hans Bier Haus and Hudson Lounge, two West U bars on either side of the high rise. However, on July 3 lawyers for Robin Hood Condos upped the game by going after a Houston twitter superstar.

Kyle Nielsen, who was recently recognized by the Houston Press as being one of the best micro-bloggers in Houston, received a subpoena on Saturday July 3 from Robin Hood Condos’ lawyers demanding that he make an appearance on Friday July 7. Nielsen went on to claim in tweets and on facebook that the subpoena stemmed from a single comment that he posted to one of Swamplot’s stories about Robin Hood Condominiums.

As Nielsen has found out, the main difficulty for a blogger in fighting a subpenoa is the way the law is written. When the State of Texas passed a Shield Law to protect journalists in 2024 the wording was chosen very carefully, so carefully that it doesn’t protect bloggers. The language of the law only applies to journalists and bloggers who are paid “a substantial portion” of their livelihoods or receive “substantial financial gain” for their writing. At the time the bill was being debated Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told Online Media Daily that, because of a lack of political will, in the State Legislature it would have been impossible to expand the act to cover people who blog for free. Dalglish did say that, based on her understanding of the act,”If you are a journalist and you are doing something on the Internet for which you get paid, you will be covered.”

At the time of its passing the Shield Law was celebrated throughout much of the Texas blogosphere as forward looking. Matt Glazer of the Austin based political blog Burnt Orange Report invoked ad supported blogs like Daily Kos as examples of bloggers who meet the substantial income threshold and described the legislation as”sufficient to today’s journalism but also open for the journalism of tomorrow.”

Almost as soon as the law was passed it began being tested throughout Texas. Most often the tests were in criminal cases and one of the first high profile test cases came in the fall of 2024 when a reporter for the West Texas newspaper the Odessa American was subpoenaed to testify about the authenticity of an audio recording of a jailhouse interview with Jan David Clark a man who, at the time, was accused of murdering his wife in a botched exorcism. The Odessa American filed a motion to quash the subpoena and prevent their reporter from testifying. However, due to an agreement reached between prosecutors and Clark’s defense attorney agreeing to the authenticity of the recording the motion was rendered moot.

Despite the ongoing attempts to force to reporters to testify, there are a few cases more relevant to Swamplot and Nielsen’s situation. The most recent was a June 2024 ruling in which visiting Judge Lloyd Douglas Shaver, in the 232nd Criminal Court, affirmed the Shield Law as well as a two 2024 rulings that expanded the protection it offered to comments posted to a news story. There two main problem with each of these cases and how they wold relate to the Swamplot case. The first problem is that each and every time the Shield Law has been invoked it has been in a criminal case, the second is that it has been invoked to go after a reporter, who is paid for his or her writing, or comments on a traditional (read well funded) old media site. In the Swamplot case it is a civil trial going after a barely-breaking-even site and the people who leave comments on said site.

Nielsen, who admits that despite his accolades and recognition he doesn’t meet the substantial income criteria, and Swamplot, who most likely doesn’t have the resources to hire a top flight First Amendment lawyer, may inadvertently become victims of their own indie media success. The most positive thing that comes out of this may be that Houston bloggers realize the need to join some kind of organization for mutual support and benefit, perhaps some kind of a society, an association or even a committee.