The fall movie season has featured an unusual run of star-studded films built around true-to-life journalists in action. It’s purely coincidental, but odd nonetheless. One film, TRUTH, grapples with just that — the truth about flawed reporting into President George W. Bush’s military service. The movie features reportorial star power — namely Dan Rather and the iconic CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

The other two are films I know something about. Black Mass, with Johnny Depp starring as Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger, is based on a book by the same name that I coauthored. The book, in turn, was based on years of reporting we did as members of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team — reporting that revealed an unholy alliance between Whitey and a corrupted FBI during the 1970s and 1980s involving murder, mayhem and incalculable harm to Boston, to law enforcement and to justice.

The second film, Spotlight, with a top-notch ensemble cast, is about the Globe’s investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse by priests — reporting that won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, an award-winning journalist in his own right, wrote recently, “it’s a very good, very realistic movie.” Kevin should know; while I worked on the Spotlight Team during the Whitey story, he worked with the team on that one and later on the church scandal with the reporters now featured in the movie.

In a way, it’s been a great run for the Globe. What are the odds that Hollywood movies centered on Globe reporting would ever get made, never mind released during the same fall season? Black Mass dramatizes the horrifying FBI corruption that enabled Whitey’s dark rise to underworld power. It spends little time on the journalism behind the story. Spotlight, meanwhile, focuses mainly on the journalism, the often unglamorous grind that goes into uncovering wrongdoing on a grand scale. For me, watching a story you worked on journalistically translated to the big screen was a heady, strange ride. For example, the first time I met Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger on the set between takes he looked like Whitey, walked like Whitey and displayed a menacing, tucked-in rage that was disorienting. I know from comments my former Globe colleagues have made they, too, found surreal the process of seeing a movie made out of their work on the church scandal.

Hoopla aside, though, the films are a reminder of something way more important — that investigative reporting matters. I teach journalism at Boston University, and I’m always talking to my students about the fundamental role a free press plays in a democracy, about how journalism is a public service and essential to freedom. It can start sounding grandiose and idealistic at times, but it’s true, and when a feel-good journalism movie like Spotlight comes along I am instantly a cheerleader shouting, “See! See what I mean! See what a difference investigative reporting can make in its watchdog role, holding power accountable?”

More than a century ago, investigative reporting cut its teeth in America, when a first generation of so-called “muckrakers’’ undertook revelatory, in-depth pieces about lynching, child labor, big business and a myriad of social inequities. Following World War II there was a stretch during which that kind of cutting-edge reporting went into a Big Sleep of sorts, as the mainstream media mainly lost its investigative chops amid Cold War anxiety. But then came the two defining events of the late 20th century — Viet Nam and Watergate — that triggered a revival and expansion of tough-as-nails reporting. Indeed, it was in the early 1970s the Boston Globe created its Spotlight Team to work exclusively on in-depth projects.

Much has been made of the decline in newspapering in the digital age — the cutbacks, layoffs, buyouts and shrinking newsrooms — and, thus, a reduction in resources devoted to watchdog reporting. Indeed, these trends are dispiriting. But however bleak change seems, there are new opportunities. It’s not always in old ways, but new ones — ProPublica, founded in 2007 as an independent nonprofit newsroom producing public-interest investigative pieces, for example, or, more recently, The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news group covering the nation’s justice system. The old engines keep running, too; the Globe, under editor Brian McGrory, has been unwavering in its commitment to investigative reporting. Last month its Spotlight Team produced a story about the practice of double-booking surgeries at Massachusetts General Hospital that, to me, is worthy of another Pulitzer Prize.

Which is why a movie like Spotlight becomes a chance to inspire a new generation of journalists — as evidence of how high reporting aims and in the public good, or as Ray Stannard Baker, one of the original muckrakers from a century ago, said, “We muck-raked not because we hated our world but because we loved it.”

Dick Lehr, a seasonal resident of Aquinnah, is the co-author of Black Mass and a former member of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team.