Made for the neighborhood

The South Knoxville Ear is a free weekly paper for one stretch of Knoxville — Sevier Avenue and Old Sevier, Kern's, Ijams, Island Home, the South Waterfront, and the Urban Wilderness. Every weekend it gathers what's actually happening close to home: festivals and grand openings, trail walks and porch concerts, road closures and the neighborhood news you'd otherwise catch a week too late.

It's built to be useful, not endless — one page you can read in a sitting, with a short audio briefing for the porch or the car, a “what's happening soon” calendar, and a Past Episodes archive when you want to look back. It's free, there's nothing to sign up for, and anyone can send in an event or a piece of news for a future issue.

The whole point is simple: help neighbors run into the good stuff on purpose instead of by accident — and send a few more people down to Sevier Avenue and the South Waterfront on a Saturday.

The Ear is currently tended by a neighbor — long-time SoKno resident and South-Young High grad Andy Roberts, who's driving down to the river most weekends anyway. By day he works in AI and web marketing (at Note Fifteen and Spark Point Studio), and the Ear is a practical-AI experiment aimed at his own backyard: the research, writing, spot art, and audio are AI-assisted, then read over by a human who actually lives here. He's just the current caretaker — the neighborhood is the point.

And he doesn't do it alone. Serena — chief morale officer, four legs, zero bylines — supervises every issue from the couch. The best tips come from neighbors, though: if you know about a grand opening, a fundraiser, a road closure, or a porch show the rest of us would want in on, that's exactly what the Ear is for. Send it along.