App combines news aggregator with dating site

*Put Hanaa’ Tameez

Is news literacy on the rise? Washington, DC residents are about to find out.

THE InPress launched for Washington, D.C. residents on Thursday (Aug. 29). The goal is to help people connect (both romantically and friendly) through journalism, it said. Adam Harderco-founder and CEO.

As with most dating apps, users create a profile with a few photos and answer a few questions. They are then shown a news feed. They are asked to react to stories with emojis and rate how interesting or important they are to them. After that, the matchmaking process begins. matchmaking with artificial intelligence.

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 the PBS), “Zelenskyy to present Ukraine’s ‘victory plan’ to US in September” (from the Euronews), “Here are the legal hurdles that still stand between Trump and Election Day” (of the Political), “California Legislature passes sweeping AI safety bill” (of the The Verge), “Your Late Summer 2024 DC Area Activity List” (of the Washingtonian), and “Going solo: Are bands going out of style?” (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 is currently self-funding the app and has a staff of seven part-time employees, but no one is getting paid.

Harder expects to raise venture capital funding in the fall. A previous campaign in IndieGogo raised $3,660. It also hopes to make money through subscriptions, advertising, content partnerships and sales of anonymized user data.

Journalism is “the means of showing how any group feels emotionally about any number of topics”said Harder.

InPress uses a third-party global news service called Opoint to fill your news feed. On any given day, 72 stories will be highlighted in the news feed from a list of 279 approved sources. Stories from sources with “hard paywalls” (as Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist); stories from sources that do not participate in Opoint (The New York Times); and stories from sources with lots of ads and pop-ups. Ultimately, Harder said he hopes to partner with some news outlets that don’t currently appear on InPress.

InPress chose DC to launch in an election year because that’s where a large portion of the population is likely to consume news and be interested in this type of app, Harder said.

The concern, he said, is to ensure that the AI ​​doesn’t create matches based on a shared love of negative news.”We don’t want people to connect over things like school shootings,” he said.

“Can you imagine how awkward and horrible that would be?… We want people to connect over tangible things like roller skating or indie music, because the idea is to connect based on the things you like. That’s what gets you in, and if you’re a different person philosophically, that’s fine. But the idea is that maybe those interests are enough to connect you with people who might not be interested in you on another dating app.””, he added.

Sign up for the InPress waiting list here and share your impressions here.

*Hanna Tameez is a staff writer at Nieman Lab

Text Translated by Eduarda Teixeira. Read the original at English.

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