Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.

After Huddersfield Town’s 1-0 home win over Wigan Athletic, manager Michael Duff wanders into the press room to meet an assortment of ruddy faces slowly thawing out on the seats in front of him. As is customary, the first flurry of questions are asked by the local reporter. What makes Huddersfield Town rare is that the reporter comes not from the town’s newspaper or radio station, but an independent.

Until a year ago, Steven Chicken was the dedicated Huddersfield Town correspondent for The Huddersfield Daily Examiner. Before him, Mel Booth covered the club for 22 seasons. Then came the latest round of cuts to local journalism, redundancies at the newspaper and Chicken knew that his time was up.

He’s now the editor of We Are Terriers. His departure from The Examiner left Huddersfield Town supporters, a historic club with relatively recent Premier League experience, without a full-time writer covering them for the first time. Within weeks of redundancy becoming the reality, Chicken had been able to relaunch on his own. The process was as seamless as possible.

“It’s something that I had always had in the back of my head when I was at the Examiner, because we all know the shape that the industry and redundancies tend to come round every few years,” Chicken says.

“You knew that you were always on borrowed time, unfortunately. That’s just the nature of the industry.

“So I always wondered whether we could do it independently, if the time came. We knew that the podcast was very popular – David Hartrick is a brilliant co-host and we knew that it had a good audience for the size of the club, so we thought that people might stick with us if we went independent with the podcast and started charging for it.”

We Are Terriers is run through Substack, a publishing platform that allows individual enterprises to release content directly to their audience via email and website. Free content is offered in the form of post-match player ratings and a weekly news round-up; Chicken says that he didn’t want to charge for content that supporters could get for free elsewhere.

The bulk of the offering is for paid subscribers, of which there are enough to far surpass even Chicken and Hartrick’s highest pre-launch expectations. Paid subscribers get two pieces of long-form analysis, typically running to 1,500-2,000 words each, and a weekly podcast that had proven immensely popular in its old guise at The Examiner. There is other bonus content as appropriate, aided by the success of the project in general.

Chicken is humble enough to admit that he had no idea how We Are Terriers would go. His reasonable expectation was that it would provide some part-time income to him, allow Hartrick to be paid for his co-hosting duties and sit alongside from other freelance work. Chicken had begun studying for a law degree and was prepared to change career.

In fact, We Are Terriers started at sprinting speed and has continued to grow. Chicken is able to earn a living, Hartrick continues to co-host, the site pays a freelance sub-editor to ensure standards remain high and Chris Nee, a freelance podcast editor.

Chicken also employs Arthur Difford, a university student and Huddersfield fan, in a paid capacity to cover the club’s women’s team. Twelve months on from the site’s birth, it is its own operation. It has more than 2,000 subscribers in total, more than 10 per cent of the average home attendance.

“I’m writing the pieces that I want to write,” Chicken says.

“I understand the newspaper model: they have space to fill and they have targets for page views. You’re trying to get multiple pieces out per day and, let’s be honest, sometimes it’s hard to find enough information of interest to do that.

“Now I’m only writing quality content. We’re doing what we want and hopefully what the fans want too. We’re independent, we’re not really answerable to anyone and you’re doing things that you believe are truly worth doing.”

Huddersfield Town 1-0 Wigan Athletic (Tuesday 3 December)

• Game no.: 43/92
• Miles: 83
• Cumulative miles: 7,050
• Total goals seen: 120
• The one thing I’ll remember in May: The placement of the John Smith’s Stadium, in a dip but one that appears after an uphill walk, is prime ‘floodlights through the mist’ territory. I’ll never see it better than this.

Perhaps surprise is misplaced here. Some football supporters clearly just want to dip into their club as a live match experience and need no other coverage to feel sated. But most have a desire for quality coverage that, in places, has become thin on the ground. Clubs outside the Premier League tend to get national coverage when things go remarkably well or badly; as such there are few places offering considered analysis combined with a positive user experience for those who love clubs in the EFL and the National League.

As cuts to local journalism continue to bite, opportunities open up. Not The Top 20 is run by Ali Maxwell and George Elek, also on Substack, and offers analysis across the EFL’s three divisions. NTT20 have won awards for their extensive coverage, and Chicken is keen to thank Maxwell for the help he offered ahead of his own launch. The point is this: football fans will pay for quality coverage of their clubs.

But the other side of the equation is just as important: football clubs need coverage. For all that they have become content creators of their own, an independent media is required to be a conduit between them and their supporters. A football club in fine health invites scrutiny and accepts criticism as well as appreciating praise.

The aim is never to be a mouthpiece for the football club; supporters quickly see through that anyway. But there is a necessary symbiosis here into which We Are Terriers has fitted snugly. You try to represent the views of both club and supporters while offering an informed take on your own view.

“We were saddened to learn of Steven’s redundancy from The Examiner, having been fortunate to receive dedicated, bespoke daily coverage from the local paper for the entirety of our existence up until that point, and we were only too aware of how many supporters still looked to the newspaper as a primary source for all club matters from recognised reporters,” says David Threlfall-Sykes, Huddersfield Town’s chief operating officer.

“The success of the endeavour speaks to the trust and relationship Steven and David have built with supporters, with their thoughts and opinions held in high regard. Journalism remains important to the experience of any supporter with their team. They are fair, measured and honest in their reporting, and we are glad to have seen We Are Terriers grow in both size and reputation since its inception.”

This project works here because it is an authentic product sculpted by experts who already had a relationship with supporters. You could argue that Huddersfield Town is also the perfect club to trial this model: size of hyper-local fanbase, average attendance, division.

But what’s of wider interest is whether this could be a sustainable future for club-specific football coverage in this country. Sam Morshead worked on The Swindon Advertiser until 2015, subsequently leaving for national roles. He and two others founded CounterPress, a platform that allows reporters to self-publish and self-promote. The Moonraker is the concept project, offering long-form coverage of Morshead’s beloved Swindon Town.

“We launched in August 2024 and have maintained a steady level of subscribers since,” Morshead says.

“Prior to setting the title up, our market research indicated the potential catchment area was between 300 and 800 paying subs at any one time, with 800 being the maximum we were likely to see at any point based on Swindon’s average attendance, responses to surveys, and market insights from the area.

“We have not dipped below 500 since 30 August, which pleasingly means we appear to have got our audience research spot on. This is not a full-time job for me at present, but the income it is generating is not to be scoffed at. It has certainly proved that the concept has potential to grow.”

This is not a coup. Local newspapers and their websites remain at the heart of the relationship between football supporters and their clubs. Having national newspaper coverage at crucial times remains vital to offer an outsider view. None of this is likely to change soon.

But at a hyper-local level, there is now an alternative and it’s an exciting one for supporters who crave detailed, independent analysis. It comes with responsibility: being the few people fans turn to is a great privilege that must be treated with great care. Get that right – immerse in your audience, build up a relationship, listen to people, focus on what will make them come back rather than what will make them click on once – and something beautiful can grow. Choice is never a bad thing.

Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here