The Bulletin this month endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president. Many readers agreed with this decision, and many disagreed. Vehemently.

In letters objecting to our endorsement, readers called our reasoning “ridiculous,” wondered whether the first half of the editorial was written by the same person as the second half (it was) and predicted that “The Bulletin will one day be ‘EXCEPTIONALLY SORRY’ to have endorsed Hillary Clinton … but not as Sorry as America.” The latter comment responded to our assertion that Clinton is exceptionally qualified to be president.

Those of us in the newspaper business deeply appreciate readers like this. By “this,” I don’t mean readers who disagree pointedly with the views expressed by our editorials, though that’s just fine. I mean readers who understand the role a newspaper’s editorial page plays in public debate, whether the topic of the day happens to be a city ordinance or a presidential election.

Elements of a standard editorial page include a newspaper’s own editorials, which express the views of an editorial board composed mostly of editors and opinion writers. There are also letters and columns expressing the opinions of readers. (The quotes above are from letters and emails submitted for publication.) Editorial pages also feature the work of syndicated opinion columnists and that of editorial cartoonists.

An editorial page is a sort of public square surrounded by other journalistic neighborhoods, which include news, business, features, sports and so on. It can be a traditional page, printed on paper, or an electronic equivalent — our website, for instance, which groups opinion content in much the same way that our printed paper does. The readers quoted above are well-informed citizens of this particular village who’ve exercised their prerogative to protest. We appreciate their participation — even if they consider those of us on the editorial board dopes.

Anyone reading this column in print or on our website is likely to be familiar with the function of editorials and editorial pages. But this column may not appear only in print or on our site. It may be posted to our Facebook page, and it can be shared online and read by people who may be unfamiliar with printed newspapers and their electronic equivalents.

And that’s fine, just as it’s just fine to read an editorial in isolation. Still, pulling an editorial from its neighborhood and spreading it electronically increases the odds that it will be read by someone who knows little about editorials and how they function on a printed or electronic editorial page. And the result isn’t always good. Consider a couple of responses to our Clinton endorsement, both submitted via Facebook, which presents content out of context.

“The purpose of journalism is to inform people of facts in as unbiased a way as possible,” offered one reader in the endorsement’s comments field. “You have failed.”

This is simply wrong. Bias is certainly to be avoided in news stories, but it’s at the heart of opinion writing. And, yes, editorials, including endorsements, are a form of journalism. Our editorial board has opinions, just as our readers have opinions. The editorial page is where they all coexist in reasonably civil proximity. And it works as a result of norms that don’t seem to exist in many places online.

Consider the following direct message (essentially email) sent to our Facebook page by someone who’d read our Clinton endorsement there. “Maybe you should have actually stayed neutral and objective but hey that’s why it’s ‘news’,” he wrote. It wasn’t enough for the writer to exhibit a basic lack of newspaper understanding. He also felt compelled to slip in a line about “the executables of your ‘news’ organization.” It’s one thing to say we’re wrong, but quite another to say we should die.

Civility is the price of publication in print and on our website, and this tends to encourage the kind of behavior we could use a lot more of elsewhere online. Civility, meanwhile, is a lot easier to maintain when readers know that an editorial is a journalistic exercise rather than a violation of journalistic ethics. To that end, reading material in context is useful.

My point here is not to discourage anyone from reading editorials in isolation, which is how they’re presented on Facebook and in many other places online. Rather, it’s to encourage them to read editorials occasionally in their natural environments, printed and electronic.

They’d be reminded of something devoted newspaper readers know: The editorial page’s form has a function, which is, among other things, to encourage and embody the sort of civil disagreement that seems to have gone by the wayside this election season.

— Erik Lukens is editor of The Bulletin.