| Net Worth: | $18 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional television journalist |
| Date of Birth: | August 8, 1958 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 1.72 m |
About Deborah Norville
It wasn’t until Norville was a sophomore in college that she made her television debut. She got an internship on the nightly program The Lawmakers, which reports on the Georgia General Assembly, through Georgia Public Television. An executive at Atlanta’s WAGA-TV saw her work and offered her a paid internship for the summer. She had already interviewed President Carter on live television in January 1979.
Norville’s hometown is Dalton, Georgia, which is also where she was born. She competed and won the 1976 America’s Junior Miss pageant for the state of Georgia. She won the local Junior Miss event, a beauty pageant for high school seniors.
Despite her loss, she says that getting a glimpse at the inner workings of the CBS Television production team changed her mind about pursuing a career in law and instead decided to pursue a career in television journalism.
In January 1987, Norville became the first and only solo female anchor of a network newscast when she was hired by NBC News to host NBC News at Sunrise. When she started on Sunrise, the show’s ratings went up by 40 percent, prompting NBC to ask whether she could fill in periodically on the Today Show. Bad Girls, a documentary on violent adolescent girls that Norville hosted in August 1989, was the eighth most watched show that week in the ratings. In 1999, she was the host of America’s Junior Miss.
Norville’s Total Net Worth
Deborah Norville has earned estimated total career income of $30 million dollars. Of that amount, $1-2 million is expected to have been paid in business related costs. The remainder, $28.5 million, will have been taxed at a rate of around 42% as Norville has been residing in the state of Georgia. After tax, it is estimated that her career earnings are at around $16.53 million dollars, having paid around $11.97 million dollars in taxes.
Deborah Norville married Karl Wellner in 1987 and they remain together. In her personal life, Deborah Norville is estimated to have spent $2 million dollars of her career earnings but also probably possesses assets valued at around $700,000, not including investment assets. Some of her career income will have been converted into investment assets, her returns from which are being estimated at $2-3 million dollars in value. Therefore, it is estimated that Deborah Norville has a net worth of around $18 million dollars.
After finishing college, Norville became a full-time reporter for WAGA-TV and was promoted to weekend anchor in October 1979. Chicago’s WMAQ-TV (owned by NBC) hired her in 1982 for the roles of reporter and, later, anchor. In the 1986 film Running Scared, starring Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal, there is a quick view of Norville on a billboard, during her time at WMAQ-TV. The Chicago mayor at the time, Harold Washington, proclaimed a week long celebration of Deborah Norville after it was reported that she would be joining NBC News in New York. Niki, Kyle, and Mikaela are Norville and Karl Wellner’s three children from their 1987 marriage.
The Today show hired Norville as its news anchor in September of 1989. Not long later, Jane Pauley made public her intention to depart the Today Show, and Norville was tapped to take her place. Later, Pauley had her own prime-time talk show, Real Life with Jane Pauley. In January of 1990, Norville started co-hosting Today. She was honored with an Emmy for her work on NBC’s coverage of the democratic uprising in Romania while she was on Today.
It was announced in May 1991 that Deborah Norville would be hosting a prime-time program on ABC TalkRadio Networks, which she would do from both her New York and Long Island residences. Newsmakers were interviewed and listeners’ calls were taken on Deborah Norville’s show, From Her Home to Yours. It began in September 1991 and ended in October 1992, when Norville resumed her broadcast career by joining CBS News. In October of 1992, Norville made a return to television when she was hired as a correspondent for CBS News. She covered the Mississippi floods of 1994 for both Street Stories and 48 Hours, for which she received her second Emmy award.
In the ’80s, she was a contributing editor at Inside Sports, and from 1991 to 1993, she did the same for McCall’s. Also needed after Connie Chung’s promotion to co-anchor of the CBS Evening News was a regular host for the CBS Sunday Evening News. Norville has been the host of the syndicated newsmagazine Inside Edition since the show’s inception in 1995.
The news that Deborah Norville would be hosting a program at 9:00 p.m. on MSNBC was announced in 2003.
In 2005, she announced her departure from Deborah Norville Tonight due to the difficulty of balancing her work for Inside Edition and MSNBC with her personal life. A performance career for Norville in infomercials kicked off in 2008. In collaboration with Premier Yarns, a North Carolina yarn producer, she released the Deborah Norville Collection of knit and crochet yarns, in addition to appearing in ads for anti-aging creams and lotions.
After being elected to the Viacom board of directors in 2013, Norville has been a member of the pay committee since 2014.
In 2015, Norville was named the host of the upcoming season of Knit and Crochet Now!, a public television craft show. Due to the December 2019 merger between Inside Edition’s parent company CBS and Viacom, she resigned from the board. Norville stated on April 1 that she would be having surgery to remove a malignant lesion from her thyroid. A spectator discovered the bulge in Norville’s neck and immediately suspected malignancy.
Summing-Up
Deborah Norville is the host of the nationally syndicated show Inside Edition and the mother of three children (son Niki, son Kyle, and daughter Mikaela). She has won two national Emmys (1988). She has co-anchored America Tonight (1994) and Today (1993), and she has also worked as a correspondent for Street Stories (1992) and 48 Hours (1988). Norville, a former Georgia beauty queen, succeeded Jane Pauley as co-host on Today (1952), sparking a firestorm of controversy and numerous unfavorable newspaper clips comparing the relative qualities of intellect and beauty and lamenting the horrors of ageism in television news departments.
She wrote “Back on Track: How to Straighten Out Your Life When it Throws You a Curve” as a result of her difficult time at NBC (Simon & Schuster, 1997). Additionally, she has penned two children’s books: “I Don’t Want to Sleep Tonight” (Golden Books, 1999) and “I Can Fly”. She received the University of Georgia’s highest honor for graduating: Summa Cum Laude.
