A smart question. The grammar book may say that in this circumstance the 1st character be pronounced the second tone while the 2nd and 3rd character remain the third tone. But in real life, especially in colloquial expression, the 3rd character is pronounced a NEUTRAL TONE, which means it doesn't have a tone. So a native speaker will pronounce like this: ní(2) jiě(3) jie(0). This phenomenon shows up widely in words with two repeating characters. Here are some other examples: 谢(xiè)谢(xie),我(wǒ)爸(bà)爸(ba),叔(shū)叔(shu).