How interactive infographics foster audience engagement

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Interactive infographics serve as a container that helps store and present information for journalists and newsrooms to the audience. The increasing use of interactive infographics in news stories has attracted many communication researchers to investigate different aspects of interactive infographics. Built on the previous information graphics research, an online experiment was designed to examine how different levels of infographics -- none, low, medium, and high, would impact audience engagement with a story via interactive infographics. The results showed that low-level interactive infographics have significant contribution to foster audience engagement compared to no infographics condition, however, high-level interactive infographics produced a similar level of audience engagement compared to no infographics condition. Implications for media practitioners and communication researchers will be discussed, but are objects to some limitations.