A news sharing start-up called Ongo, which has raised $12m from USA Today publisher-Gannett, the New York Times Company and the Washtington Post Company.

It is headed by former eBay executive Alex Kazim, who previously ran defunct  blog aggregator Tokoni. At eBay he was a senior VP and president of Skype.

Ongo apparently plans to launch a consumer service “for reading and sharing digital news and information from multiple publishers”.

Very interesting to see three major publishers coming together on a news sharing and social media project. Whatever the exact nature of Ongo’s idea it has clearly has the attention of three of the biggest in the US. It might well be setting up to challenge the large scale agregators, such as the Huffington Post, which soak up so much web traffic.

HuffPo was last week attacked by Leonard Downie Jr, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, who used the James Cameron Memorial Lecture at London’s City University to accuse other blogs and aggregators of being “parasites living off journalism produced by others”.

Ongo launched three months ago, but is not publicly available. According to Kazim’s LinkedIn profile Ongo has about a dozen former Tokoni members of staff on board, including Mary Lou Song who is married to Kazim and is the new company’s chief product officer.