In August 1996, a regional newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News unveiled the results of its year-long investigation into links between the spread of crack cocaine in the U.S. and fundraising for the CIA-backed contra rebels in Central America. “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion” was the first investigative report to achieve national prominence primarily via Internet dissemination. Investigations by three of the country’s largest dailies, rather than advancing the Mercury’s claims, turned into a sustained and damaging critique. Commentators have characterized this sharp scrutiny of a respected regional paper as everything from a defense of journalistic standards to damage control for the CIA. Nearly all, however, have ignored the larger critique of the Internet as a medium of news distribution that emerged in the follow-up coverage. This study examines the controversy as a case of news repair, as defined by Bennett, Gressett, and Haltom (1985), noting what the case reveals about the operation of news repair itself in an era of Internet-based news delivery. The repair of “Dark Alliance” affirmed a paradigmatic understanding of what is and is not news. More broadly, it defended the authority of established broadsheets over the new media and affirmed the traditional hierarchy of national over regional newspapers. This paper argues that the Internet’s role in the publication of this controversial exposé created both need and opportunity for repair of institutional boundaries—those violated by the Mercury’s use of the new medium and a more general erosion in the ongoing migration of news to the Internet.