Still unclear about the company’s prospects? CEO Brad Anderson tries to spell it out: “We believe that there has been a dramatic and potentially long-lasting change in consumer behavior as people adjust to the new realities of the marketplace.”

But! There is at least one glimmer of not-terrible news buried in the retail giant’s report this morning: Same-store sales for November–that is, year-to-year comparisons for stores that have been open for at least 14 months–were “essentially flat.”

That’s once you factor out a weird calendar anomaly between this year and last year. If you don’t account for that, same-store sales were down 8.7 percent. But whatever. Flat is the new up, and we need good news, so we’re taking what we can. The company says that while store traffic was down, people were buying bigger ticket items like notebook computers and mobile phones.

Why are you reading about a retail giant’s performance in a media column? Because the performance of Best Buy (BBY) and other retailers during November and December is going to have a big impact on ad budgets for 2009.

Alas, not all of the media news coming out of Best Buy is as good (or at least not bad). The company reports “double-digit declines” in movie and music sales (thanks for nothing, Guns ‘N Roses fans) and single-digit declines in videogames.

In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.”

Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.

Like Yahoo Answers, Mahalo’s new product relies on users to answer other users’ questions. Unlike Yahoo’s (YHOO) site, Calacanis promises to give his most prolific answer-givers a chance to make money, via a virtual currency they can earn by answering questions.

The proposition: Users can ask questions for free. But they can also buy “Mahalo Dollars” using real money and reward people who answer their queries. Users can eventually cash out the Mahalo currency they earn for real dollars, with Calacanis taking a 25 percent cut.

This aligns him with a growing number of Internet execs who think they can make money via virtual goods and currencies. That’s worked well for Asian companies and a handful of Western videogames, like Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft. But the market for virtual stuff has yet to appear at most U.S.-based Web sites.

Still, Calacanis thinks he’s got a better shot of making it work next year than his original plan for 2009: Selling ads on his site besides the ones he runs from Google’s (GOOG) AdSense. “I think it’s going to be very hard to make money selling ads,” he said. “The market needs this more than it needs us out there trying to sell inventory.”

All of this supposes that people are actually willing to pay for advice they get over the Internet. I’m dubious, but then again I had no idea Yahoo Answers was as successful as it was until Calacanis walked me through the user stats in his demo*: 24 million unique users in the U.S., according to Quantcast.

I did try it out myself, and found that Calacanis’s beta users (who are presumably incented to answer as many questions as they can) did a decent job of answering my query about moving my Palm data to my BlackBerry via my MacBook–and much better than the people at Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, who didn’t even try.

But it’s still not good enough. Looks like if I want to get this done I’m going to have to pay someone real cash.

*A note for anyone who ever has to demo a product: Find some way to watch Calacanis go through his paces live if you can. You can get a sense of the experience by reading his tutorial, or by watching video of him in action. But it’s another thing to get it in real time, and watch him simultaneously hype and soft-sell. Really effective stuff.

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

The Wall Street Journal reports that Redstone’s National Amusements holding company has sold its 87 percent stake in Midway (MWY) for $100,000, plus the assumption of $70 million in debt, to Thomas. On Friday, that stake was worth something like $30 million.

The real upside for Redstone, the paper says, will be a tax loss of some $800 million, though it’s unclear how he will be able to use that to help restructure his debt. Over the years, Redstone invested an estimated $500 million in the game maker. Redstone still has a few other assets that aren’t CBS (CBS) or Viacom (VIA), but those are by far his most valuable properties.

What does Thomas get out of this? It’s not entirely clear. Midway is best known for its “Mortal Kombat” franchise, which was once considered controversial because it allowed players to rip out the still-beating hearts of their opponents. But that’s old hat these days, and even new iterations like “Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe” haven’t been able to sustain the company, which has lost $494 million in the last five years and has been under constant threat of losing its NYSE listing in recent months.