Just before taking off for the weekend on Friday afternoon, I saw a blog post claiming that a film critic had died from a heart attack suffered during a press screening of A Mighty Heart. Returning to the computer this morning, it’s clear that the story wasn’t just a bad joke: Anderson Jones, formerly of E! Online and most recently of FilmStew.com, did indeed pass away sometime last week whilst watching the Angelina Jolie film at the Arclight in Hollywood.

As former editor of RoughCut.com, Jones was responsible for turning David Poland into a blogger. As an editor at E! Online, he frequently shared his expertise on-camera in various installments of the E! True Hollywood Story. Tributes to Jones are flying in from all corners of the web, although as Jeff Wells notes, E! has yet to comment, or even post a news item about the passing of their former employee. This might owe to the fact that Jones’ association with the site didn’t exactly end well. As FilmStew’s Richard Horgan puts it, the “always outspoken, proudly gay and often infuriating” Jones

…cried wolf so many times with E! Online that when he finally really did have a humdinger of a dog-ate-my-homework-scenario