I think the thing journalists find interesting is that Japan is creating these particular words at all, when most languages/cultures don’t bother. (Edited: removed some badly-sourced assertions.)

We have an English word “truant”, referring to someone who happens to not attend schooling; but we have no English word for someone who actively avoids the education system. This is an uncommon construction; I don’t think there’s another language besides Japanese that has such a word. This is a problem that has only risen to the level of intensity to need public knowledge and communication about it in Japan—at least, so far.

It’s interesting that they need such a word enough to not only create it, not only to make it short, but that it seemingly is a word any average Japanese person might now know. The fact that this word exists as a “layman’s term” says a lot about the phenomena. The fact that it replaced an earlier, less PC word for the same thing says even more!

(But, besides the subtle statement being made by introducing an element of cultural linguistic evolution, journalists are probably also trying to be “the person who was responsible for introducing a loan-word into English.” Since English doesn’t have this word, but might need it sooner-or-later, maybe we’ll use the Japanese one, like we did with taifuun, karaoke, or emoji. Probably the journalists who first used those words in English-language articles feel very proud of themselves.)

> Rather, “futoko” is a noun to refer to the children themselves.

Futōkō (不登校) refers to the act/phenomenon of not going to school, i.e. truancy, not the children.

> We have an English word “truant”, referring to someone who happens to not attend schooling; but we have no English word for someone who actively avoids the education system

There's also "playing hooky". While it still refers to the action, IMO its more about someone actively avoiding school/work.

“Playing hooky” is more about a particular “episode” of non-attendance, though. A regular person, who otherwise enjoys attending school, can “play hooky” because e.g. they want to stay home to play a newly-released video game. Futoko is—from my understanding—meant more as a sort of constitutional property. It’s something these children are, rather than something they’re doing.

It’s like the difference between “being depressed” and “suffering from depression.” One is a mood, that could be brought about by any number of temporary environmental factors, and really isn’t a “problem” so much as an often-expected reaction that will sort itself out. The other is a long-term state of being with complex etiology that isn’t expected to resolve without diagnosis and treatment.

Probably because it's a word that requires a sentence or two to explain what it means and it's a phenomenon which is ubiquitous enough to have its own meaning to begin with.

they're weebs

Yeah, I think a lot of it is that people are enamoured when new jargon is created that isn't just English, and there are many people who have some superficial interest in Japan. This is part of why English speakers have fun with new terms like 白左 (Chinese neolog. "white left") or 引きこもり. It goes the other way as well, I heard "NEET" first in Japanese.