Challenges and Objectives

Handelsblatt Media Group’s publications have been go-to resources for business professionals, policymakers, and investors since 1947. Today, Handelsblatt’s digital channels alone reach nearly 1.4 million users every day, including 718,000 managerial/C-Suite decision makers (IQ Digital) - making it one of Europe’s most influential news publishers.

Its legacy is part of its enduring appeal, but its business model is geared toward innovation - especially when it comes to the workflows that ensure its output across all channels is consistent, timely and of exceptionally high quality.

However, in a fragmented media landscape, Handelsblatt’s challenges are familiar to many other news publishers.

Once reliable sources of revenue like print sales and referral traffic are less reliable; free access to news is challenging the value proposition of paid news; and lastly, ‘digital’ simply means a lot more than it used to - so Handelsblatt needed to adapt content across more channels like podcasts and audio versions of articles.

In simple terms, the questions it was seeking to answer were:

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  How do we engage our audience in more ways across more channels?

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  How do we drive added value with subscriptions and app downloads?

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  How do we open new inventory channels & opportunities to monetize content?

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  How can we embed this into our existing workflows to allow us to be more agile & reactive?

Handelsblatt Media Group may be large - but it moves quickly and thinks creatively about the ways it can reach and strengthen its connections with audiences.

AI has already been a key part of this strategy: from automating its engaging trend reports with AI, to nurturing its own fee-paying ‘AI Circle’ for professional networking.

With AudioStack, however, it knew that it could bring the power of generative AI to transform its editorial approach - putting audio content on par with its written content to create new touchpoints and business opportunities.

A single tool wouldn’t do that. But a partnership could.

How Handelsblatt Media Group (HMG) Learned About AudioStack

Human-in-the-loop Generative AI is a core part of Handelsblatt's innovative focus, and where Handelsblatt looked to leverage the power of audio to reach new audiences and unlock new advertising channels, it turned to AudioStack’s expertise and technology to make it happen.

Solutions

Handelsblatt worked with AudioStack to build systems that would deliver two new content formats - audio versions of its written articles, and audio podcasts - generated entirely by AI.

It needed these to be:

Produced to a standard as if an expert journalist had voiced them, and an expert producer had mastered them. Automated as a seamless part of its editorial workflow - minimizing human interference.

AudioStack fit the bill perfectly. Here’s why:

Firstly, to create audio versions of written articles, Handelsblatt could have used a (TTS) screen-reader. But these are error-prone, and narrate content in an unengaging and generic way.

AudioStack’s platform narrates Handelsblatt’s content with lifelike human voices thanks to cutting edge voice synthesis technology. Beyond that, AudioStack also automated production and studio-quality mastering - adding sonic branding, different voices for different sections and music beds with in-built dictionaries to ensure correct pronunciation.

Secondly, Handelsblatt wanted to revolutionize its daily ‘AI Briefing’ podcast. Not only could it use AI to generate the content of these podcasts, but also clone the voice of AI Team Lead Larissa Holzki to read it.

Simply put, production of this scale, complexity and agility would have been unachievable without AudioStack’s AI-powered production workflows: and its knowledge of the news publishing process.

So, Handelsblatt had the AI tools and the expertise. What this is already empowering them to achieve is remarkable.

Results

Every time AI Audio is used at Handelsblatt, it is powered by AudioStack.

In the case of written content, the process is as seamless as automatically generating a fully-produced audio article when the written version is approved by the editor: slotting perfectly within its integrated publication platforms like Kordiam, LivingDocs and HuGo.

Every day, 100+ audio versions of articles are produced at the time of upload, reaching 150,000 weekly listeners, whilst the daily AI briefing can be produced regularly without a creative team - letting Handelsblatt react quickly to developments in this important field.

But beyond just transforming content, Handelsblatt is using audio as a value-added for its readership: most audio content is gated in-app to its paid ‘Wirtschaftsclub’ members, who receive a number of other benefits; whilst free audio articles are ad-supported, creating new inventory for Handelsblatt to monetize.

Lastly, Handelsblatt could depend on the system being stable - even during the high-traffic period of the 2025 German Federal Elections (Bundestagwahl) - 127 articles were published in 48 hours, with 100% platform uptime.

For Handelsblatt, AudioStack has become its advantage - letting it react quicker, reach more people, and create novel opportunities for revenue generation.