
The National Deer Association is pleased to present its 2024 Signpost Communicator of the Year Award to Dave Maas of Minnesota, Editor of Bowhunting World and Archery Business, as well as the Grand View Outdoors website. Named after the organization’s first newsletter, the Signpost Award goes to an outdoor communicator who shares accurate information with deer hunters, works to ensure a strong future for whitetails, and supports the NDA and its mission.
A productive outdoor writer, Maas turns out a significant amount of deer content for the magazines and websites he edits. He regularly cites, links to and promotes content from the National Deer Association website in the process. Statistics from NDA’s Deer Report serve as material for his research and reporting. Maas also shares NDA videos when the content is a fit for Grand View audiences. And he has offered NDA opportunities to share their mission and deer conservation priorities with Bowhunting World readers.
“Once, Dave reached out to us because he wanted to cite one of our articles in his own writing, but when he went back to get the link from our site, he got an error code,” said Lindsay Thomas Jr., NDA’s Chief Communications Officer. “He started checking and found other articles unavailable, and he alerted us to the problem so we could fix it quickly. That’s a good friend of the organization.”
Maas has been a deer hunter since age 12. He spends most of his outdoor time hunting deer with family and friends in western Wisconsin and eastern South Dakota. The photo above is a South Dakota buck he took in November 2024. He also hunts in his home state of Minnesota
Maas got his college degree in mathematics and planned to teach high school math and coach baseball. But his first after-college salaried job at The Hunting & Fishing Library, a book publishing company, steered him into outdoor communications. He went on to serve 13 years as editor at North American Hunter magazine, five years writing for OutdoorHub.com, and eventually to his current position as Editor for Bowhunting World and Archery Business magazines, and the Grand View Outdoors website.
Dave’s math training still comes in handy, he said. “When a writer sends in a story that talks about bullet drop or arrow drop, I’m one of the few editors who can actually check the math and see if it’s correct.”
Previous winners of NDA’s Signpost Communicator of the Year Award include Katie Hill of Texas (2024), Alex Robinson of Minnesota (2022), Josh Honeycutt of Kentucky (2021) Mike Hanback of Virginia (2020), Dan Johnson of Iowa (2018), Tony Hansen of Michigan (2016), Will Brantley of Kentucky (2015), Mark Kenyon of Michigan (2014), Scott Bestul of Minnesota (2013), Andy Whitaker of Alabama (2012), Patrick Durkin of Wisconsin (2011), Bob Humphrey of Maine (2010) and C.J. Winand of Maryland (2009).