[1] Malec attended State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, where he worked as an editor for the college's student newspaper and was involved in a censorship dispute regarding student free speech rights.
[2] He was named "Best Local Blogger About Country Music" by the Nashville Scene in 2009, with the paper commenting that he is "rough on country music in the way that only a person who loves and thinks deeply about an art form can be.
"[1] Malec's work has appeared in American Songwriter,[3] Slant Magazine,[4] Westword[5] and other outlets, and he is a contributor to the Nashville Scene's annual country music critics poll.
[6][7] Malec is noteworthy for his coverage of Taylor Swift in the early stages of her career, referring to her as "a superstar in the making" in 2007.
This biographical article related to music journalism in the United States is a stub.