This is what I was able to find out from our Esri rep...our story map countdown app doesn't display because our base maps are not in Web Mercator projection; they are in our local state plane projection.
If this is the case why the app won't work...and does seem to be because if we switch out base maps to a generic Esri one, it works...then will there be support for base maps in a projection other than Web Mercator?
I don't really want to have to switch up our tiling scheme to conform to ArcGIS online/Bing/Google tiling scheme.