Deborah Norville, who was 36 when she joined the syndicated newsmagazine show “Inside Edition” in 1995 after reporting for CBS News and anchoring on NBC’s “Today,” will be stepping away from the anchor job after 30 years.
“It has been such an honor and privilege to be here at ‘Inside Edition’ for all these years. A milestone like this is a time for reflection, and on reflection, I have decided that now is the time to move on,” she said Wednesday during the show, where over the years she has appeared more than 3,350 times. She hit the 30-year mark in March.
The “Inside Edition” season ends in September.
“They made me a lovely offer to stay, but there are things I’d like to do and places I want to do them that continuing here doesn’t permit,” Norville said, adding that her time on the show has been “an honor I don’t take lightly.”
She said she would talk later about the “exciting things” she has in the works.
“When I started this job, Bill Clinton was president, O.J. Simpson was on trial for murder and ‘Forrest Gump’ was about to win big at the Oscars,” Norville said in a more casual version of the departure video posted on X (formerly Twitter). She wound up becoming the longest-running host in American television, she said.
“Deborah’s powerful presence, both on-screen and behind-the-scenes, has contributed immensely to the success of ‘Inside Edition’ for the past 30 years,” executive producer Charles Lachman said in a news release. “She has made a lasting impact on the show, and I’m excited to follow along as she builds upon her outstanding broadcast legacy in her next chapter.”
A 1995 story from The Times marking Norville’s start as anchor of “Inside Edition” said the new gig didn’t mean she was “going tabloid” or compromising her journalistic credentials, even though the show paid some sources for stories.
“She hasn’t turned sleazy, hasn’t become part of a ‘12-fanged monster’ determined to do nothing but titillate and trash up the airwaves with its tawdry yarns,” staff writer Steve Weinstein wrote. “Or so she says.”
“People attach the label tabloid to ‘Inside Edition’ and the others. That we’ll all just throw anything on television. But that isn’t true,” Norville said at the time. At “‘Inside Edition,’” she said, she and colleagues “check out and verify every scrap of information that we include in a story; we have standards that are as strict as at the networks.”
“Inside Edition” is in its 37th season, regularly viewed by 3.6 million people. Ratings jumped 15% when Norville joined and have remained high ever since, according to CBS Media Ventures. Recent topics on the show include whether the late Gary Coleman’s wife leaked his death photo in 2010, what killed former Yankees player Brett Gardner’s 14-year-old son Miller and an investigation titled “Why Are Thieves Stealing Stanley Cups?” (That last was about those trendy, massive drink tumblers, by the way, not the NHL championship trophy.)
The show was the only one in first-run syndication that stayed in production through the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, stories have touched on the California wildfires, the upside-down plane crash in Toronto and President Trump visiting disaster zones.
Plus behind-the-scenes coverage from the Grammys and the Oscars.
“All of those same people who said I’ve really burned my bridges this time also once said that I’d never work in television again,” Norville told The Times in 1995. “I’ve been written off before, and if these folks decide to write me off again, they will only be wrong for a second time.”
One mission Norville had 30 years ago, when she walked away from network news, was to win another Emmy to add to the two she had already, one for covering an uprising in Romania and the other for coverage of the 1994 floods in Mississippi.
She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy last year, along with colleagues Steven Fabian, Lisa Guerrero, Ann Mercogliano, Jim Moret and Les Trent.
The category? Daytime personality, daily. But it didn’t happen. The Emmy went to the staff from “Entertainment Tonight.”