Photo-Illustration by Niky Chopra and Omari Foote.For a lot of people in this city, reading the news tends to be part of their job rather than a first step in a flirtation. But a new dating app, InPress, is attempting to pair romance with reportage: Half news aggregator, half matchmaker, the platform links users based on their shared media consumption. Finally, I won’t have to stop reading a feature on the global economy to open a different app and feign interest in Brad from Rosslyn’s best travel anecdote. Currently, InPress is available only in Washington. “Where would you launch a news-based dating app in the US?” says CEO Adam Harder, a former journalist and Columbia Heights resident. Harder cofounded the app with chief technology officer Alex Long, who lives in Dupont Circle. They are part of a small team that handpicks articles from different outlets to push out to InPress users, who then rate each with an emotion such as “excited” or “angry” and score how important and interesting the article was to them. Potential matches are based on an algorithm that takes into account similarities between users’ reads and ratings. It’s a typical dating app from there, with the familiar swiping right and left. When it comes to the articles, don’t expect anything too controversial. “We don’t need politics or toxic things, because we’re trying to actually build bridges here,” says Harder. “You can’t have people match on things like school shootings or ‘build the wall.’ We want people matching on things like the 9:30 Club and wakeboarding.” Being a journalist and a person in the dating pool, I recently decided to give it a try. I downloaded the app and, despite being told I was 500th on the waiting list to join, gained entry within five minutes. I read an article about Sofia Vergara eating a burger at the Emmys and gave it a positive response. After several days of scrolling and reading and reacting, I didn’t get any matches. Maybe I should be looking for a different kind of connection: Long says one of the most popular segments of users has turned out to be women seeking platonic friendships. As a result, the app has already rebranded from InPress Dating to InPress Social. “It became clear to us that the form of genuine connection we’re building is just as good, if not better, for finding friends,” says Harder. So in the end, InPress did not provide a media-literate love to hold my hand through the upcoming news cycle. It seems the connection between my romantic life and my news consumption will probably remain the same: using my ex’s subscription to read the Atlantic. RelatedCould DC Really Be the Best City for Dating? This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Washingtonian.The post We Tried Out InPress, a Dating App for News Junkies first appeared on Washingtonian.