Is news literacy in vogue? Washington, DC residents will soon find out.
InPress, a news aggregator and dating app, is launching to Washington, D.C. residents on Thursday, and co-founder and CEO Adam Harder says the company aims to help people find and build connections — both romantic and friendship — through journalism.
Like most dating apps, users start by creating a profile with a few photos and answering a few questions. They're then presented with a feed of news articles, where they're asked to react to stories with emojis and rank how interesting or important they are to them. The AI starts matching them up after that.
Articles appearing on Thursday's InPress feed included: “Kamala Harris' election defies history, as only one sitting VP has been elected president in 188 years” (PBS), “Zelensky to present Ukraine 'victory plan' to US in September” (Euronews), “Here's the legal hurdles that still stand between Trump and Election Day” (Politico), “California Legislature passes sweeping AI safety bill” (The Verge), “Washington DC area bucket list before end of summer 2024” (Washingtonian), and “Solo going: are bands obsolete?” (BBC News).
Harder came up with the idea for InPress last year. In addition to working in media, he was a broadcast journalist for the U.S. Air Force for several years. He's currently bootstrapped the app and has a part-time staff of seven, none of whom take a salary. Harder hopes to raise venture funding in the fall; a previous IndieGogo campaign raised $3,660. He also hopes to make money through subscriptions, in-app advertising, content partnerships and selling anonymous user data.
Journalism is “a vehicle for people from all walks of life to express how they feel emotionally about a range of topics,” Harder said.
InPress uses a third-party global news service called Opoint to populate the news feed, which staff curates. The news feed features 72 articles each day from a list of 279 approved publications. What won't be included: articles from publications with “strict paywalls” (such as Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist), articles from publications that aren't part of O Point (The New York Times), and articles from publications that display a lot of ads or pop-ups. Ultimately, Harder says, the company would like to partner with news publications that aren't currently featured on InPress.
Harder said Impress chose Washington DC as its launch city in an election year because it's a place with a lot of avid news consumers who would likely be interested in such an app. (It's also a particularly unique place for dating.)
Despite trying to date in our nation's capital, do you think you'll find love?
— Josh Sorbet (@joshsorbe) August 28, 2024
One concern, Harder said, is making sure the AI doesn't match people based on a shared love of scary news. “We don't want people to match on topics like school shootings,” Harder said. “Can you imagine how uncomfortable and awful that would be? We want people to match on specific topics like rollerblading and indie music. Because the idea is to match on what you like. That's what gets you in the door, and it's okay if you think differently. But the idea is that these interests might be enough to connect you with people you might not swipe at on other dating apps.”
Join the InPress waitlist here and report back here on how you feel.