Laurence Michie, former television editor of Variety and a former editor at the Vineyard Gazette, died Nov. 7 at an assisted living facility in Hadley. He was 77 and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Larry Michie was known to many on the Island where he and his wife Virginia lived and worked for about 10 years beginning in the early 1990s.

Born in Chicago, he was raised by a pair of aunts in Racine, Wis. He attended Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., where he met Virginia.

His earliest inroads into journalism took place in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter at the trade journal then known as Broadcasting Magazine. He was subsequently hired by Liz and Les Carpenter, who had close ties to the Lyndon Johnson administration and provided news coverage for many Texas newspapers as well as Variety. By the late 1960s, he was covering Washington developments for Variety exclusively.

Living in New York, he was the third in a triumvirate of Variety TV editors who wielded great influence in their era at the broadcast networks, local stations and in the burgeoning TV syndication market, when Variety was often the principal source of information about the inside workings of the industry. It was an era when the three terrestrial networks dominated the airwaves and cable TV was in its infancy. He succeeded Les Brown as Variety TV editor.

Following his departure from Variety, he and Virginia bought and operated a western Massachusetts weekly, the Shelburne Falls & West County News, for a decade starting in the mid-1980s.

Also during this period, he editorially organized and wrote for myriad Variety special sections covering foreign show business on a freelance basis. The assignments took him from Europe to the Middle East to Japan, Korea and China.

In the early 1990s, he and Virginia moved to the Vineyard. Larry worked at the Gazette as an editor and writer from 1993 to 2000, also doing work for the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

In his later years he was also a novelist. His 2013 science fiction novel, Chasers, is about a futuristic Russian invasion of western Massachusetts, and his novel, The Wars of Warren Temple, follows a Union officer making his way to Texas to fulfill a promise to a dying Confederate officer.

He is survived by his wife of 56 years.