Is news literacy hot? Washington, D.C. residents are about to find out.

Part news aggregator, part dating app, InPress is launching for Washington, D.C. residents Thursday. It aims to help people find and build connections (both romantic and friendly) through journalism, co-founder and CEO Adam Harder told me.

As with most dating apps, users start by creating a profile with a few photos and answering some questions. Then they see a feed of news stories. They’re asked to rank to react to the stories with emojis and rank how interesting or important the stories are to them. After that, the AI matchmaking begins.

Among the stories in the InPress feed on Thursday: “Kamala Harris’ election would defy history, only 1 sitting vice president has been elected president in 188 years” (from PBS), “Zelenskyy to present Ukraine’s ‘victory plan’ to U.S. in September” (from Euronews), “Here are the legal hurdles still standing between Trump and Election Day” (from Politico), “California State Assembly passes sweeping AI safety bill” (from The Verge), “Your 2024 End-of-Summer DC-Area Bucket List” (from Washingtonian), and “Going solo: Are bands falling out of fashion?” (from BBC News).

Harder came up with the idea for InPress last year; among other media jobs, he was a broadcast journalist for the U.S. Air Force for several years. He’s currently self-funding the application and has a team of seven part-time staffers, but nobody is being paid. Harder hopes to raise venture funding in the fall; a previous IndieGogo campaign raised $3,660. He also hopes to make money via subscriptions, in-app advertising, content partnerships, and anonymized user data sales.

Journalism is “the conduit to inform how any demographic feels emotionally toward any number of topics,” Harder said.

InPress uses a third-party global news service called Opoint to populate its news feed, which is then curated by staff. On any given day, 72 stories will be featured in the news feed, from a list of 279 approved outlets. Not featured: Stories from outlets with “strict paywalls” (like Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist); stories from outlets that don’t participate in O Point (The New York Times); and stories from outlets with a lot of of ads and pop-ups. Ultimately, Harder said, he hopes to form partnerships with some news outlets that don’t currently appear in InPress.

InPress chose D.C. as the launch city in an election year because it’s where a large population of people are more likely to be avid news consumers and be interested in an app like this, Harder said. (It’s also a particularly unique dating scene.)

do you think you are capable of love despite trying to date in our nation’s capital

— Josh Sorbe (@joshsorbe) August 28, 2024

One concern, said Harder, is making sure the AI doesn’t create matches based on a shared love of horrible news. “We don’t want people matching on things like school shootings,” he said. “Can you imagine how off-putting and awful that would be?…We want people matching on tangible things like rollerblading or indie music, because the idea is matching on the things that you enjoy. That’s what gets you in the door, and if you’re different people philosophically, that’s fine. But the idea is that maybe those interests are enough to have you connect with people who you might not otherwise swipe on, on another dating app.”

Sign up for the InPress waitlist here and report back on the vibes here.