Deborah Norville has been through wars over the course of her career, surviving a controversial and contentious stint as co-anchor of the "Today" show that saw her down-home, beauty pageant good looks work to her distinct disadvantage. It's encouraging, then, to see how stable her life has become.
Since 1995, Norville has been the anchor of the syndicated newsmagazine "Inside Edition." During that time, the mother of three and two-time Emmy Award winner has avoided the public turmoil that she faced in her early years in TV.
These days, Norville enjoys the freedom to pursue the sort of stories she might not have been able to on the network morning shows. For one story, Norville spent a week as an inmate at the Davidson County Jail in North Carolina to show firsthand what conditions were like behind bars. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she flew on an F-16 with the 177th Fighter Wing of the New Jersey Air National Guard.
Outside of journalism, Norville has turned her passion for knitting into a fun, side career. She released the book "Knit with Deborah Norville" earlier this year and has launched her own line of yarns, called the Deborah Norville Collection.
Bankrate spoke to Norville about her career, the joy she finds in journalism and her advice for those who lost their money in the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Bankrate: After all this time and considering the twists and turns of your career, does this job still satisfy you as a journalist?
Deborah Norville: It's not difficult to be satisfied because the news focus has changed a lot during the course of my career. When I first started in television, a sound bite would run more than a minute. Now on "Inside Edition," we will do packages -- which is our term for a complete, self-contained report -- that might only last 13 seconds. Were I a child today, I would probably be diagnosed with ADD. So it's a perfect career because it changes like that.
And it's even more interesting now, because I think the happy outcome of the presidential election, the financial collapse, the subprime mortgage crisis and the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan is that people's attention has come back to what I personally think matters a whole lot more (such as) where this country's position is in the world vis-a-vis the opinion of the rest of the world. Are we making the right decisions individually with respect to our futures -- whether it's about our kids' educations or our own 401(k)s -- and have we been smart about the way we financed our house? People are asking themselves more questions about their personal lives, about their lives as citizens and about our nation's role in the larger world, and I think that's a really healthy outcome.
Bankrate: You write a lot on your Web site and your blog about journalism in general. What's your take on the state of journalism today?
Deborah Norville: Technology has changed enormously the way journalism is done. I think it puts a bigger burden on journalists to do the story better than the citizen blogger, who may have his or her opinions, and those (opinions) may be based on absolutely stellar information or they may be based on some of this malarky that gets forwarded by e-mail. I think the state of journalism today is an opportunity to step up and report the news in a way that's going to be useful for our news consumers. If we do our job well, then those people who are sounding the death knell of the newspaper business and the decline of the broadcasting business may have to eat a few of their words because I think people recognize how important useful information is.