DJ Questlove, center, with Raise Up winners at the Kennedy Center event, from left: Jonathan Williams of Milwaukee; Sarah O’Neal, Oakland, Calif.; Nytesia Ross, Tyler, Texas; Aaron Golden, Harper Woods, Mich.; and Jourdan Lee, New Orleans. (Photo: Joyce Boghosian)
• DJ Questlove was one of several special guests at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Sunday night as CPB’s American Graduate paid tribute to winners of its Raise Up spoken-word competition. Five young people shared their poems about the challenges of staying in school at the event, hosted by Glynn Washington of public radio’s Snap Judgment. Other performers included actor and author Hill Harper, hip-hop artist and youth activist Asheru and Black Thought of The Roots. The project is a collaboration with San Francisco–based Youth Speaks.
• Goldman Sachs reportedly has barred its investment bankers from trading individual stocks and bonds, following reports by This American Life and ProPublica based on interviews of a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner, reports Bloomberg News. Carmen Segarra alleged that she was fired in 2012 because she refused to change her finding that Goldman Sachs didn’t have a conflict-of-interest policy, Bloomberg notes. This American Life posted a transcript of the program.
• Feature Story News is ending its daily half-hour FSN Reports, according to Radio Survivor. FSN launched the program after Free Speech Radio News ended on Pacifica last fall. In a Sept. 23 email to stations, FSN President Simon Marks said the producer had underwritten some production costs, but “we’re at the point where we now need to devote our resources in a different direction.”
• West Virginia Public Radio is partnering with Gibbs Kinderman, formerly of Allegheny Mountain Radio, on “Traveling 219,” a web project celebrating life along U.S. Route 219. Kinderman tells The Associated Press that he wanted to replicate the work of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project from the 1930s and early ’40s, documenting the history of ordinary people. VISTA and AmeriCorps volunteers are helping gather video, oral histories and old and new photographs.