Editorial staff of the Original Videojournal came together with the foundation of a samizdat video-magazine of the same name. Although the initial impulse came from Václav Havel, who brought together the members of the group and also coordinated contact between them and supporters living in exile, he soon withdrew and Olga Havlová became the spiritual mother of the project. During the autumn of 1987, several founding meetings took place and the group agreed to publish an underground publicist magazine on VHS cassettes, which came out two or three times a year. The content of OVJ was not tied down to political issues, but instead tried to map alternative culture and environmental causes to target a wider audience. In the same year, a zero number was issued, containing most of later permanent sections:
Malý zpravodaj [Small Newsletter] – politically focused news or remembrance of a significant anniversary
Náš host [Our Guest] – the presentation of a significant person through a brief interview
Dokumenty [Documentaries] – a longer, elaborate contribution on ecological or political topics
Reportáž [Reportage] – about important events reported directly from the place
Dílna [Workshop] – introducing an artist's work directly in their studio
and Společenská rubrika [Social Column], Fotogalerie [Photogallery] (without commentary, just music) and Slovo pro Jiřího Kantůrka [The Word for Jiri Kanturek].
The exact composition of the editorial board is not known, since only the editorsʼ names were published, and thus targets of the secret police.. Members of the group also often played more than one role at a time. Despite mild uncertainties, the group can be divided into three sections:
a) a narrow editorial board which held sessions on the conception, the content of the sections and supervised the final form of new parts:
Olga Havlová – editor of the ecological section, columnist and photographer
Michal Hýbek - cameraman, film editor who was also responsible for the reproduction of copies
Pavel Kačírek - chief-director, cinematographer and editor responsible for an overall assembly
Jan Kašpar - cameraman, columnist
Andrej Krob - cameraman, columnist
Jan Ruml - editor of the political section, columnist
Joska Skalník - editor of the cultural section, columnist
Andrej Stankovič - columnist
b) a broader range of external collaborators who have contributed to the themes and production:
Jarmila Bělíková – columnist
Přemysl Fialka - cameraman, photographer
Aleš Havlíček - cameraman, columnist
Jiří Kantůrek - columnist, discussion moderator
Jaroslav Kořán - columnist, photographer
Jaroslav Kukal - cameraman, photographer
Milan Maryška - cameraman, columnist
Petr Oslzlý – columnist
Jiří Reichl – columnist
Jiří Mergl - cameraman, sound engineer
David Schmoranz – cameraman
c) collaborators who helped distribute material and finance expensive equipment:
Karel Freund – messenger
Frantisek Janouch - representative of the Charta 77 Foundation
Vilém Prečan - representative of the Czechoslovak Documentation Center of Independent Literature
Jiřina Šiklová – messenger
The work of the editorial board intensified a year after OVJ was founded. On the one hand, the public was actively getting involved, more and more protest events emerged and new democratic movements arose. On the other hand, cameramen had more than the one original video camera so they could shoot several events at a time. However, the pressure of the police was also stepping up and after a raid in samizdat Lidové noviny [The People's Newspaper], the creators of the OVJ had to do a better job of hiding most of the technical equipment in their friends’ flats. As a result, the reports from the demonstrations in the autumn of 1989 were made in even more provisional conditions than usual, but several "revolutionary diaries" came out at once. After the Velvet Revolution, the group's activity decreased until it eventually disappeared altogether. The break in Original Videojournal production came after Václav Havel became the president in December 1989 when the samizdat authors could join the officially published press, film production, etc. But creators of OVJ still managed to film a New Year's Eve celebration in 1989/1990 at Prague Castle, which a lot of recently released dissidents attended. A year after that, a part of the editorial board founded a private company called Original Videojournal Ltd. and with the help of a dozen professional filmmakers, the company produced several documentaries over the next few years.
