La prensa confirmó la noticia.

Here la prensa means the press or the media in general, not just one physical newspaper.

In Spanish, prensa can mean:

• press/media as a collective institution
• sometimes newspapers/the press more specifically, depending on context

So in this sentence, La prensa confirmó la noticia means that the media confirmed the news.

Spanish uses definite articles more often than English does.

• la prensa = the press
• la noticia = the news / the news story

Even where English might sometimes omit the, Spanish often keeps it. In this sentence, both nouns are specific:

• a specific source: the press
• a specific item of news: the news/story

Also, prensa and noticia are both feminine singular nouns, so they take la.

Confirmó is the preterite tense of confirmar, for él/ella/usted.

So it means:

• he confirmed
• she confirmed
• it confirmed
• you confirmed (formal)

In this sentence, the subject is la prensa, which is grammatically singular, so confirmó means the press confirmed.

The preterite is used here because it refers to a completed action in the past.

The accent mark in confirmó shows both pronunciation and meaning.

Compare:

• confirmo = I confirm
• confirmó = he/she/it confirmed

The accent tells you the stress falls on the last syllable: con-fir-MÓ.

Without the accent, it would be a different form of the verb.

Spanish often omits subject pronouns because the verb ending already gives enough information.

Instead of saying:

• La prensa confirmó la noticia

you could theoretically add a pronoun, but it would usually sound unnecessary:

• Ella confirmó la noticia would mean she confirmed the news, not the press confirmed the news

Since la prensa is already the subject, no extra pronoun is needed.

Grammatically, prensa is singular, even though it refers collectively to journalists or media organizations.

That is why the verb is singular:

• La prensa confirmó...

This is similar to English collective expressions like the press. Even though many individuals are involved, the noun is treated as one unit.

In this sentence:

• La prensa = the subject, the one doing the action
• confirmó = the verb
• la noticia = the direct object, the thing being confirmed

You can test it by asking:

• What did the press confirm?
• La noticia

So la noticia receives the action of the verb.

Because la noticia is a thing, not a person.

Spanish uses the personal a mainly before specific human direct objects (and sometimes pets or personified beings). For example:

• Veo a María.

But with things, you normally do not use a:

• Confirmó la noticia.

So there is no a here because la noticia is not a person.

Yes. Noticia often means:

• news item
• piece of news
• news story

That is why la noticia here is best understood as:

• the news
• the news story
• the report

This is a little different from English, where news is uncountable. In Spanish, una noticia is one item of news, and las noticias can mean the news in general or the news reports.

Yes, but the normal and most neutral order is:

• La prensa confirmó la noticia.

Spanish allows more flexibility than English, but changing the order can make the sentence sound more literary, emphatic, or less natural in everyday use.

For example:

• La noticia la confirmó la prensa.
  This emphasizes the news.
• Confirmó la noticia la prensa.
  Grammatically possible, but less neutral.

So the original sentence is the standard, straightforward way to say it.

In standard Peninsular Spanish, it would sound approximately like:

la PREN-sa kon-fir-MÓ la no-TI-thya

A few key points:

• prensa: stress on PREN
• confirmó: stress on the last syllable MÓ
• noticia: in much of Spain, the ci sounds like thya, so no-TI-thya

A rough IPA transcription for Spain is: [la ˈpɾen.sa koɱ.fiɾˈmo la noˈti.θja]

If you pronounce noticia with an s sound instead of th, that is also fine in Latin American Spanish.