SPECIAL CHARACTERS

How an ambitious young journalist came of age in the tech sector and made her mark at CNN.

In the economic dark days of 2009, then-23-year-old Segall wrote her first story for CNN.com, “about how a small business was trying to make do in the global recession by opening up a topless coffee shop in Maine.” Elsewhere in the recession, she asserts, "a new creative energy" was emerging, represented by a group of brainy misfits who developed products that remain household names—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder—as well as some that fizzled and were forgotten. Collaborating with a few women colleagues who became close friends, Segall plotted, networked, and scrapped her way from transcribing tapes and typing chyrons to telling the story of tech on-screen. In 2010, she took vacation days and paid her own way to SXSW, where she pretended to be a producer and interviewed the whiz kids. Seven years later, she was there to premiere her own series, Mostly Human. As the kooky fun of the early days gave way to bots, hacking, fake news, and revenge porn, the author uncovered the Boston Marathon bomber's deleted Instagram account, documented the fallout of the Ashley Madison leak, and landed the first interview with Mark Zuckerberg after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Segall ran into many obstacles—mainly her own persistent impostor syndrome and entrenched sexism at CNN—but whenever she faced rejection, she and her friends dropped everything and blasted Janis Joplin's "Another Piece of My Heart." A few downsides: The prose is only serviceable, some points are belabored, and romantic relationships seem to take as long to die on the page as they did in real life (a fight over who gets to keep Alexa is about as juicy as it gets).

Inspiring on the personal level while somewhat chilling on the societal one.