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In 1986, when it was announced Norville would be joining NBC News in New York, Mayor Harold Washington declared "Deborah Norville Week" in Chicago. A brief glimpse of Norville on a billboard, during her time at WMAQ-TV can be seen in the background in the 1986 film Running Scared starring Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal. In 1982, she was hired as a reporter and later an anchor by WMAQ-TV, the NBC-owned station in Chicago.
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Norville joined WAGA-TV as a full-time reporter after graduating and was named weekend anchor in October 1979. show I'd drive back and go to class Monday morning." In January 1979, she conducted a live interview with President Jimmy Carter. I worked Saturday and Sunday Sunday night after the 11:00 p.m. Dendy for the Georgia Alumni Record (February 1990): "I'd leave the university on Friday afternoon and drive to Atlanta, and sometimes I had a place to stay and sometimes I slept in my car in the parking lot. The 60-mile commute between school in Athens and work in Atlanta was grueling, as remembered by Norville in an interview with Larry B. As Norville recalled, "The third day they were short on reporters and they asked me to cover a news story." She reported that evening on the six o'clock news and was later offered a weekend reporting position during her senior year in college.
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She was spotted by an executive of WAGA-TV in Atlanta, who offered her a summer internship. She received an internship through Georgia Public Television, where she worked on The Lawmakers, a nightly program covering the Georgia General Assembly. Norville began her television career while still a college student. During her studies, she served on the Main Court of the University's Student Judiciary and was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She was named a First Honor Graduate and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She graduated summa cum laude in three years with a perfect 4.0 grade point average in earning her BA in journalism from the university's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Norville is a graduate of the University of Georgia. She hosted the 1999 America's Junior Miss contest. She did not win but credits seeing the behind-the-scenes work of the CBS Television production team as inspiring her to switch her career goal from law to television journalism. She won her town's local Junior Miss contest, a beauty contest for high school senior girls and represented Georgia in the 1976 America's Junior Miss pageant.