Prior to joining City Journal, Malanga was executive editor of Crain’s New York Business for seven years, serving on the publication’s editorial board and writing a weekly column. He also supervised special projects, including investigative stories. Before that, Malanga served for seven years as managing editor of Crain’s. During his tenure at the publication, it twice won the General Excellence award from the Association of Area Business Publications.
In 1995, Malanga was a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism for the series “Nonprofits: New York’s new Tammany Hall,” which he co-authored. In 1998, a series he co-authored, “Tort-ured State,” about the influence of trial lawyers in New York State, was voted best investigative story of the year by the AABP. The previous year, a computer-assisted project that Malanga designed, reported, and wrote on Small Business Administration loans in New York City was voted one of the year’s best investigative stories by AABP.
Malanga has also written articles on various topics for The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and other publications. Malanga is the author of The New New Left (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) and The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), co-authored with Heather Mac Donald and Victor Davis Hanson.