The text of the email:

Dear Contributor,

I'm writing to inform you that Business Insider will no longer continue to have a self-submitter program for Contributors. Over the next few weeks, we'll be disabling your contributor account. You'll still have the ability to comment on our site as a user.

We appreciate your contribution to the site and hope that you will still participate in the Business Insider community.

Best Regards,

Lauren

--
Lauren Brown
Contributors Editor, Business Insider

"The best roundup of experts across the media landscape" is how BI styles their contributors, who are not listed on the masthead. Seems like a great way to outsource your content farming: BI has posted 17 contributor posts already today. (Also, hell of a platform if you can get it.)

Running guest posts from non-staff contributors, often without compensation, is common practice in the post-HuffPo blogosphere. But this is the first we've heard of a self-submit program. Innovation, or invitation for libel lawsuit?

But perhaps the free-for-all was too much as BI raises the stakes with its new funding round and accompanying pageview pressure. "We're just focusing on fewer contributors," Ms. Brown said in response to questions from Betabeat. She neglected to say how many contributors had been in the program or why it was being scaled back.