Every journal carries one story type. Yours says Story because that is what UNI sets when the journal is created, before you have written anything. Nothing is missing and it is not a warning: you are never made to pick one, so unless you changed it, Story is what you have.
It is worth changing anyway, because the type does real work rather than sitting there as a label.
What the type actually affects
Three things, all of them visible to readers:
- It appears in the byline on your journal. The line under your name reads as a sentence: your name, published, the story type, then your disciplines. A piece labelled Story when it is plainly a Review reads oddly to anyone who opens it.
- It is a filter on the journals feed. Readers browsing uni.xyz/journals can narrow the list by journal type. Someone filtering to Review will not be shown a review you left as a Story.
- It decides what UNI offers as further reading underneath your journal. Those suggestions are drawn first from editorially selected journals of the same type, so your choice shapes the company your writing keeps on its own page.
What it does not affect
The type does not decide whether UNI features your journal. Editorial selection and featuring are judgements made by the UNI team about the writing itself, and no type is favoured over another. Choosing News will not get a piece handled as news, and leaving it as Story will not hold a good piece back.
It has no effect on who is notified when you publish, on how the journal appears on your profile, or on its web address.
The ten types
Story, Blog, Design Process, Review, Interview, Letter, Lists, News, Results and Help. All ten are offered to every member, and there is no approval step on any of them.
You can change it after publishing, and it takes effect at once
The story type is not frozen the way the address is. Change it on the metadata line in the editor and it applies to the live journal straight away, without going through Publish and without touching anything else. That is unlike the title, tagline, body and cover image, which are all held back until you publish.
So a journal you released years ago under the default can be relabelled today, and it starts appearing under the right filter immediately. The address stays exactly as it was: see Your journal's web address is fixed the first time you publish.
Journals vs publications covers the equivalent choice on a publication, which works the same way.