About

What This Site Is

This site publishes David Poland’s daily Hot Button podcast as readable long-form articles. Each episode is automatically extracted from Substack, transformed into a polished written column, and posted here — preserving David’s first-person voice, opinions, and personality throughout.

If you’d rather read than listen, this is for you.

Who Is David Poland?

David Poland is a veteran entertainment industry journalist with over 30 years covering Hollywood. He founded The Hot Button as a daily podcast and newsletter focused on the business of film: box office analysis, studio strategy, trade news, CinemaCon coverage, awards season, and the state of theatrical exhibition.

He publishes on Substack at davidpoland.substack.com, where you can subscribe to get the original podcast and his written work directly.

How This Works

Each episode is processed through a pipeline:

1. The transcript is extracted from Substack using a headless browser
2. The transcript is transformed into a written column using Claude (Anthropic’s AI), with instructions to preserve David’s first-person voice, keep all content and opinions, clean up spoken-word artifacts, and organize the material into readable sections
3. The result is published here as a Jekyll post, with a Toplines section at the top summarizing the factual highlights for quick reading

The transformation keeps everything — the digressions, the sarcasm, the strong takes, the nostalgia, the frustration with bad journalism. It’s not a summary. It’s David’s podcast, written down.

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial fan project. The articles here are AI-transformed versions of David Poland’s spoken content from The Hot Button podcast. All opinions, analysis, and commentary are David’s — the AI only rewrites the form, not the substance.

For the original podcast, writing, and full archives, visit davidpoland.substack.com.