It will be fascinating to follow the development of the new universal ArcGIS Story Map template (let's call it "new template"), which is intended to eventually replace the group of Esri Story Map templates, among which the most well-known and widely used in Slovakia are the Tour, Journal, and Cascade templates.
At the recently concluded GIS Esri 2019 conference at the Partizán hotel, I was supposed to have a short presentation on how GIS helps manage mountain bike trail projects. I decided to prepare my presentation using the new template to test how it works. The result resembles story maps provided by the Cascade template. However, I believe that the new template offers more beautiful and let's say "more decent" results. This is naturally related to the implementation of elements that the template offers and also to the style themes of the new template. It offers two basic themes - black (Obsidian) and white (Summit), both of which are very nice and simple. As with every more powerful template, it is very important to handle active elements carefully and not to overwhelm the result with too many effects. I tried to solve this problem by rhythmically alternating simpler sections with more complex ones. Whether I succeeded, judge for yourself. The result is here.
Personally, I would recommend the new template for this type of use. However, one must be careful because Esri warns that during its development there may be changes in the template that cause loss of used data. After all, it is still only a Beta.
If you are interested in the topic of the new template, we would be very glad if you express your opinion on this topic in our discussion
https://community.esri.com/message/857054-mapy-s-pr%C3%ADbehom-story-maps
I will try to comment soon on interesting features of the new template, such as express map, in another blog 
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Peter Nemec
