Your journal's web address is set once, at the moment you first publish it, and it does not move again. Renaming the journal afterwards changes the title everywhere readers see it, but the address stays as it was. That is protection rather than a limitation: every link you have already sent to a client, posted on social, or listed in a portfolio keeps working, because it points at something that never changes underneath it.
The address is built from your title and tagline at the moment you publish
When a draft becomes published, UNI takes your title and your tagline, joins them, lowercases the result, turns everything that is not a letter or a number into a hyphen, and cuts it to 40 characters. Forty is a hard limit, which is why the address for a long title often stops mid-word. If another journal already has a close address, a number is added at the end so the two do not collide.
Both fields feed into it, and they are joined by the word desc. That is why a published journal often has an address reading something like our-city-our-identity-desc-prushing-thro: the part before desc is the title, the part after it is the start of the tagline. A journal whose title you never touched can still have an address that reads oddly, because the tagline is in there too.
Before you publish, nothing is fixed yet
A journal that has never been published has no web address at all. It is created at the instant you press Publish, out of whatever the title and tagline say at that instant.
So the draft stage is where the address is decided. Rewrite the title as many times as you like while the piece is a draft: the address is built from the version that is on screen when you publish.
After you publish, the address cannot be changed
There is no mechanism for changing it directly. It is not editable in the journal editor, and it is not editable by UNI staff either, because the field is read-only in our internal tools. The one thing that does rebuild it is a journal being unpublished and then published again, which is why that is worth avoiding once a link is out in the world. Writing to support will not produce a different address, and we would rather say that plainly than have you wait on a request that cannot be actioned.
If a different address genuinely matters more than the journal's history, the only route is publishing the piece again as a new journal. That one starts over with no views, likes or comments, and leaves you deciding what to do with the original. For a rename, that trade is rarely worth it. The title readers see, the title in search results, and the title on your profile all update the moment you save. Only the address stays behind.
Plenty of published journals carry an address that no longer matches their current title. None of them is broken.
Publications work the opposite way, and that is what catches people out
A published publication does not behave like a journal. Its address is rebuilt from its title and description every time it is saved, not once at first publish. Nearly every published publication carries an address matching its current title and description, which is what that rebuilding looks like from outside.
There is no forwarding from an old publication address to the new one. Editing the title or description of a publication you have already shared will break the link you shared, and anyone following it lands on a page that no longer exists.
So the rule is reversed between the two:
- Journal: settle the title before you publish, because afterwards the address is frozen and every shared link is safe.
- Publication: settle the title and description before you share the link, and re-copy the link from the page after any edit to either field.
Journals vs publications covers where else the two differ.