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Family Comes First

Anchor Deborah Norville Has Had An Amazing Career, But Her Brood Is Her Heart

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On the day we spoke with broadcast journalist Deborah Norville, she was getting ready to do her second feed of the day for “Inside Edition,” the nationally syndicated news program where she’s been the anchor since 1995.

Family has always been important to Norville. Born one of four daughters, Norville’s mother was ill most of her childhood. “My upbringing was very different from my friends’. If my mom picked me up from school, that was a big deal because that meant she was feeling well,” she says. Her mom had rheumatoid arthritis and died when Norville was 20 years old.

“Because my childhood was not the ‘station wagon and the picket fence’ one imagines one’s childhood would be, it was really important to me that when I had kids, if I could make it happen — that kind of childhood — I wanted to do it,” she says. Before “Inside Edition,” Norville, who turns 65 this month, traveled the world as a correspondent for CBS News. But when she was pregnant with her second child, she made a decision that would change the trajectory of the rest of her career.

We’ll get to that in a bit. First, you need to know how Norville got into broadcast journalism in the first place.

Unusual Talent

Norville admits that she originally wanted to be a lawyer. But an announcement over the loudspeaker in her high school changed all that.

Hailing from Dalton, a town in northern Georgia that Norville describes as “the carpet capital of the world,” she remembers during her senior year of high school when it was announced that if any of the girls wanted to hear the United States Junior Chamber — better known as the JC’s — talk about Junior Miss, they would be excused from fifth period.

“I didn’t know what the JC’s or Junior Miss was, but I knew what fifth period was, so I was out of there,” recalls Norville while laughing. Turns out that it was a competition — like a beauty pageant — but without the bathing suit requirement. And, she could win money for college.

But she needed a talent.

“I don’t play the piano; I don’t tap dance. I was too scared to sing in front of people. Playing the flute was just what I did in the marching band,” says Norville. “So my choices were to twirl an 8-foot flagpole, which I also did in the band or model clothing that I had made myself.” She’s been making her own clothing since she was nine years old.

Norville ended up modeling clothes. She won local. She won state. But then when she was on to nationals, to represent Georgia in the 1976 America’s Junior Miss Pageant, the woman in charge told her that she had to do something else as well.

“So they made me learn magic tricks. My talent was sewing and magic,” recalls Norville. She then went on after a contestant who sang an aria from the opera “La Bohème.”

“She was really good. I was not. That’s what they said. They literally started laughing,” says Norville.

While she didn’t win that competition, here’s what made it all worthwhile: it was televised by the CBS network, and they selected five girls to randomly do the introduction to the show. The last girl got to announce the host. That turned out to be Norville.

“The first words I said on national TV were ‘Michael Landon,’” she says.

Remember how Norville planned to be a lawyer? Well, she wanted to do it because she loved that it involved a lot of research. But while participating in these competitions, she discovered that TV reporters conducted research as well.

Norville attended the University of Georgia, majoring in journalism and mass communication.

Serendipity Strikes Again

During her sophomore year in college, Norville attained an internship for Georgia Public Television covering the Georgia General Assembly. Five nights a week, she and three other students produced an hour-long show about what was happening in the Georgia Legislature.

On the last day of the session, the wife of the head of the CBS affiliate told her husband about Norville. He saw potential in her, and soon she received a call from WAGA-TV, who hired her as an intern for the summer. She was supposed to be a gopher. But then, an unexpected opportunity arose.

“My third day, they were low on reporters. They said, ‘Norville, go cover this story.’ I chose not to let them know that I didn’t know how to cover a story. I hadn’t had [the class on] Newswriting for Television yet,” Norville says.

She decided she would figure it out and bluff her way through if she had to.

“I did, and I was pretty much on the air every day after that,” says Norville. The station told her that if she kept working on weekends, they would guarantee her a job when she graduated.

Going National

After working in Atlanta, Norville went to Chicago. But then she met a guy who lived in New York. She decided to move to the Big Apple.

“It was the first time I did anything career-wise for a guy. Now we’ve been married for 35 years,” she says. That guy is Norville’s husband Karl Wellner.

In January 1987, she became an anchor at NBC’s “News at Sunrise.” After about a year, she began working as a correspondent at CBS News, sometimes traveling around the world for stories.

When she was pregnant with her second son, Kyle (son Niki was born in 1991), Norville was in Brazil doing a story for “America Tonight” about a woman who was adopting two children from the country. One night, Norville received a call from Niki, then 3 years old, and he said, “Mommy, please come home.”

“It was awful,” recalls Norville. “I literally stayed up all night crying.” At breakfast the next morning, she told the crew “You’ve got 36 hours. We’re wrapping this shoot up.”

Another game-changing experience for Norville happened when she was in Pantelleria, a tiny island in Italy, filming the story of Delta Force commandos who helped an American woman kidnap her child back from her ex-husband in Tunisia.

“This woman had literally given up everything. She sold everything to finance this effort to get her little boy back,” recalls Norville. “They were successful. The mom and kid were on the boat, and it just hit me. This woman had given up every worldly possession to be with her child, and I was willingly leaving my kid and going eight thousand miles away to do a story?”

She thought to herself, “I know what’s wrong with this picture. And it’s me.”

Early in her career, Norville heard television journalist Lesley Stahl say something compelling about the work/life balance. “She was talking about the work/life juggle that we’re all trying to get right, and she said there’s two kinds of balls you’re juggling: the work balls, which are made of rubber, and the family balls, which are made of glass. The work balls can hit the ground, and you can pick one up on the rebound. The family balls don’t work that way. You’ve got to be really careful with them,” she says.

Norville decided that she wanted — and needed — to be closer to her children. Working for “Inside Edition” would allow her to do just that.

Deborah and Karl’s second son, Kyle, was born in 1994, and she began anchoring “Inside Edition” the following year. Her third child, a daughter they named Mikaela, was born in 1997.

For the most part, Norville would work from the studio in New York City.

Family Time

Family has always been meaningful to Norville. She did her best to give her children the type of childhood that she never had. Working on “Inside Edition,” they film at 3 p.m. each day with a second feed at 4:45 p.m. “So I could be there for my kids, and that was really important to me,” she says.

Although Deborah and Karl are empty nesters now — and their kids have lives of their own — Norville continues to get together with them as much as they can. “My husband and I are always eager anytime we get to see our kids,” she says. A few months ago, she took off work to fly to California, where Mikaela lives, to have a three-day girls’ weekend, visiting the wineries in Napa.

In fact, her daughter texted her during our interview. When Norville found out all was well, she said she’d call her back later. Talking about her children, she says, “We’re definitely connected. But in terms of seeing one another, all three live in different places. So, it’s a little bit of an organizational thing.”

During the summer of 2022, though, the family was able to take a family vacation together. “It was just awesome because we like being together, and we laugh a lot,” says Norville. “I think that’s what family is meant to be. It’s meant to be fun!”