Luke O’Neil reports that Jeff Lawrence, co-founder and publisher of what started as the Weekly Dig, has died.

He hired, and fired, me from my first job. I always cared about him over the years even though he sometimes made it very hard to. A fun guy and such a pain in the ass I don’t think he would mind me saying.

Or as Lawrence described himself, in Barry Thompson’s history of the Dig:

This was never about me. I’m not a writer. I’m not a messiah. I’m not somebody who - you know what I am? I encourage people to do what they should do. And that’s it. Everything else? Fuck that. I don’t give a fuck.

Lawrence had started a monthly music magazine called Shovel in the early 1990s, when he got the idea for something bigger:

My grandmother died, and she left my father some money. I got $40 grand. So I went swimming at the Somerville YMCA - I love to swim - and then afterwards, I was sitting in a hot tub. I was still really trying to find my place in this world in my mid-20s, and was like, "I need to do something." Shovel had become successful insofar as people were calling me up and buying ads, but I had no clue in terms of publishing. I had a background in journalism and working for a college newspaper, but I didn’t know the inner-workings. I don’t have a degree in business. But all of a sudden it just hits me; "The fucking Phoenix has no competition! I need to start a weekly!"

With co-founders Joe Bonni and Craig Kapilow, the Dig launched in the fall of 1999.

The Phoenix did not take kindly to the idea of an upstart. But what eventually became DigBoston outlasted its older rival, which folded in 2013.

Lawrence sold the Dig to Boston Magazine in 2004, bought it back in 2007, then sold it to its editors in 2017. The Dig finally gave up the ghost in 2023, after lean pandemic years, although its spirit lives on in the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

More of Thompson’s history of the Dig (search for "oral-history").