I think that's what it's telling you, and I'm a bit tired after working all day but I'll try to answer this as coherently as possible.
The only pages that I have changed are the actual journal "display" templates (the pages with the recent entries on them). Those templates are:
journal_deftemp,
journal_display, and
journal_customtemp1 .. I believe. Every other part of the journal system has been untouched and should pretty well display the same.
But whenever you click your journal and nothing but the 'Add Entry' box pops up, that tells me a few things.
#1. Have you entered an entry in your journal and is it displaying okay on the page with the white background?
#2. Is the custom option selected in your journal config? If so, try linking to an image or typing some words or something in the 'Custom Header' box to see if it displays whenever you look at your journal.
#3. It's entirely possible I'm still leaving something out of the install, so don't fret.
If it
is what I think it is and you've selected the 'Custom' option for your journal instead of the 'Alpha' template, then you'd be entirely correct. Your header and footer would just need a little tweaking and working to have it display however you like.
However, if you're selecting the 'Alpha' or 'Default' template and are only receiving what you're telling me, then something is badly wrong and I need to find out what it is immediately.
I can update the journal.php a bit, which I was planning on sooner or later anyway, to tell the user to (atleast) add a custom header.
Look forward to hearing your reply.
** EDIT ** : So I decided to fix the custom template white-out problem. I added an admin-set message telling the user that they need to add a header [if the header information does not exist].