After authoring a story map you typically want to publish it, this can give rise to some unexpected problems with regard to the access rights of underlying data. The most common of these issues is that the sharing of maps and data used is not set to include the audience you wish to share the map with. i.e. If you wish to share a story map publicly the maps and data used in the story map also need to be shared publicly, and you should set the sharing on the individual maps dan data before publishing. However The story map publishing process will highlight most issues and attempt to fix them as can be seen in the following where a story is published to the organisation and specifically to a group within the organisation.

You might then receive an error message saying Content authentication needed indicating that some map and its layers need to have other sharing changed.

You can either click return to builder and then go into ArcGIS online and change these sharing rights manually or click Yes, publish anyway (which i recommend) because the publishing process will now ask if it should change the sharing of the maps and layers.

Chose “Yes, share these items” and the sharing of the items will be changed and the story map shared.