Despite the fact that Crowley has won ACES' top award for headline writing, he regularly finds that his funny headlines for the Review-Journal have been re-written by the online desk to be more search-engine-friendly. For example, when Harrah's casino announced plans to build a new entertainment center with an observation wheel, Crowley came up with the headline "Brave new whirl." The online desk changed it to "Harrah's plans retail, entertainment center."

"I understand the shift toward search optimization," he says. "But I think we're losing something when we take the wordplay and surprise out of headline writing."

In a widely circulated 2010 article criticizing SEO practices, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten made the same point by citing a Post article about Conan O'Brien's refusal to accept a later time slot on NBC. The print headline: "Better never than late." Online: "Conan O'Brien won't give up 'Tonight Show' time slot to make room for Jay Leno."

The dearth of witty headlines on the Web is enough to make a copy editor cry. But rather than settle for a humorless future, some online editors are fighting back by refusing to embrace SEO guidelines for every story.

"It's not about getting the most readers; it's about getting the 'most best' readers," says David Plotz, editor of the influential online magazine Slate.

"There are headlines you can write which, because they're so clear and have so much of the subject in them, you will get a little bit more SEO," Plotz says. "But if you write a really clever headline that your most Slate-like readers love, and they think, 'I'm so in on this joke,' you will deepen that relationship with them."

However, even this happy-medium approach has its naysayers in the SEO camp.

"Readers need more information when they're browsing content on the Web -- it's a fact," says Ian Lurie, president of a Portent Interactive, a Seattle-based Internet marketing agency specializing in SEO. "Depriving readers of valuable information in an effort to make them click will backfire every time."

Because young journalists are beginning their careers at the dawn of the SEO craze, some funny-headline advocates wonder if the battle has already been lost.

"Sharp, witty headlines that stray off the 'literalness' line will live, barely, for a little while longer," says Lexington Herald-Leader copy editor Will Scott. "However, as the veterans of newspapers are gradually replaced by younger copy editors who grew up with the Web, we will see such headlines less and less."

Indeed, the same week that Crowley was sharing his passion for puns with fellow copy editors in Phoenix, SEO experts were sharing their zeal for data with college students in New York City. At the national College Media Advisers conference, students attend sessions like "SEO 101 for Journalists," where they are told not to be "tempted" (the word used by one session leader) to write funny headlines.