The Road Ahead: DETOUR’s Next Chapter

Sometimes the map you’re following only takes you but so far.

In 2020, DETOUR was conceived in the stillness of a pandemic. COVID-19 had the world on lockdown. Airports were empty. Borders were closed. The notion of travel had been reduced to memory and longing. But in that stillness, Black and Brown people continued to romance a world beyond our reach. That longing was the idea. And when we brought it to McClatchy, one of the nation’s largest newspaper groups, they saw what we saw – a publication whose moment was coming, whether the world was ready or not.

That kind of institutional and financial faith doesn’t happen often, and it changed what we could aspire to. In June 2022 we launched DETOUR and have since built something real, carrying our voice into markets from Miami to Kansas City to Charlotte, landing our stories in homes and workplaces in the cities where our readers live.

We also built something unexpected inside one of the great journalism institutions in the country. Our collaboration with the Missouri School of Journalism gave DETOUR a pipeline of emerging talent, student journalists learning that service to community and storytelling excellence are not competing values. That partnership reflects what DETOUR has always believed: that the future of this work lives in the next generation of voices we invest in today.

My conviction has always been simple: that Black and Brown people need a travel publication that speaks to our full lives. Not just as travelers, but as people who move through spaces that were not always designed to welcome them. People who understand that showing up anywhere to live your best life is itself a political act.

Now, DETOUR turns a new corner. And for that, I needed someone who doesn’t just understand the mission but someone who is the mission.

Daphne Bryson Jackson is that person.

Effective March 30, Daphne assumes the newly created role of Chief Visionary Officer of DETOUR. She comes to this work with more than 20 years of experience navigating the intersections of business, government, and community; as the founder of DBJ Consulting, as a certified life coach, as a co-founder of a women’s empowerment conference, and as the host of her own platform helping women move, From Here to There. Atlanta raised Daphne, which means she has been steeped in Black culture, community and excellence her entire life. She also knows that Black women don’t follow trends; they set them.

I’ll remain with DETOUR as Chief Content Strategist, focused on the storytelling that has always been our North Star, including expanding our Who Owns the Flavor? podcast series and other investigative and enterprise work that make DETOUR more than a lifestyle publication.

But let’s be also honest about why this moment really matters.

We are living through a period of orchestrated retreat from the basic acknowledgment that Black and Brown lives carry full weight in this country and increasingly around the world. Institutions that once at least feigned being an ally are now demonstrating the opposite. Those headwinds are real.

And then there’s AI. As artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems become the world’s dominant storytellers, we face the threat of misrepresentation at machine speed. AI systems trained on decades of distorted, incomplete, and biased data will get us wrong in ways that are harder to correct than anything that came before.

DETOUR is a counter-narrative to Black and Brown slander. We strive to be a living archive for our authentic stories, and a declaration that these stories not only belong to us, but will be told by us.

We know that travel is transformation. That seeing the world, and being seen in it, changes what you believe is possible for yourself. Daphne embodies this truth. And she brings to DETOUR the vision, the relationships, and the drive to build what this moment demands.

The road ahead is not simple. Work that matters rarely is. I’ve never been about the easy route. I’m about the right one.

Welcome, Daphne — and all aboard.

Ron Stodghill is the founder and publisher of DETOUR.

This story was originally published March 23, 2026 at 7:00 AM with the headline "The Road Ahead: DETOUR’s Next Chapter."