Skip Desjardin

Skip Desjardin, the author of “September 1918: War, Plague and the World Series,” is a television veteran who now works for Google, where he oversees sports and local content for the company’s ground-breaking streaming business – YouTube TV.

Over the course of a 40-year career in the media, Desjardin has changed the way we watch television. In the 1980s he helped launch the country’s first regional sports network, then pioneered the pay-per-view business in the 1990s as the head of PPV for the World Wrestling Federation in the heyday of WrestleMania. As an executive at ESPN in the 2000s, Desjardin launched the company’s first digital network, its interactive TV services and the first-ever video-on-demand agreement for a basic cable network. Later, he was executive producer of the Walt Disney Company’s first sponsored webisodes, for which he won three Telly Awards and was a 2008 Webby Award honoree.

A native of Maine, Desjardin holds two degrees from the University of Notre Dame and lives in Connecticut.