The development of hot news events is very rich, and each stage of the development has its own unique narrative. With the development of events, a trend of hierarchical storyline evolution is presented. Aiming at the problem of poor interpretability and insufficient hierarchy of storyline in the existing storyline generation methods, a Hierarchical Storyline Generation Method (HSGM) for hot news events was proposed. First, an improved hotword algorithm was used to select the main seed events to construct the trunk. Second, the hotwords of branch events were selected to enhance the branch interpretability. Third, in the branch, a storyline coherence selection strategy fusing hotword relevance and dynamic time penalty was used to enhance the connection of parent-child events, so as to build hierarchical hotwords, and then a multi-level storyline was built. In addition, considering the incubation period of hot news events, a hatchery was added during the storyline construction process to solve the problem of neglecting the initial events due to insufficient hotness. Experimental results on two real self-constructed datasets show that in the event tracking process, compared with the methods based on singlePass and k-means respectively, HSGM has the F score increased by 4.51% and 6.41%, 20.71% and 13.01% respectively; in the storyline construction process, HSGM performs well in accuracy, comprehensibility and integrity on two self-constructed datasets compared with Story Forest and Story Graph.